


And the Water Was Grey

by toyhto



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, But gently I think, Falling In Love, Homophobia, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, M/M, Religion, and a lot of rain
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-21
Updated: 2018-10-10
Packaged: 2019-06-30 18:44:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 24,953
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15757533
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toyhto/pseuds/toyhto
Summary: Remus walked past him to the tiny kitchen and he breathed in slowly because Remus still smelled the same, of old clothes and vanilla – which probably meant tea – and a bit of salt – which probably meant the sea. Back then, he had wanted to kiss Remus so badly.





	1. Part One

**Author's Note:**

> For some time now, I've wanted to write something that deals with being religious and gay, with kind of understanding or gentleness for both. So that's what I'm trying to do here. But, this is also a story about falling in love with someone you thought you left behind, and how scary that can be.
> 
> This story has three chapters in total and is betaed by lovely ambruises!
> 
> You can say hi to me on [tumblr](http://toyhto.tumblr.com)!

The place hadn’t changed. He barely remembered the day he had left, but surely it had been grey like this one. The houses had been standing in a row, watching him through closed curtains as they were doing now. The sea had crashed against the docks endlessly. He had been cold. But back then he had still had his bike and the wind had pushed straight through his jacket and gloves. Now he was cold because he still hadn’t figured out how to turn the heat on in the car.  
  
He was quite certain that when he had driven through the main street on a cold morning in late November 1981, he had known he would never come back. What had he been thinking? He was a wreck. He could barely hold himself together, let alone love someone. He had lost his best friends not a month ago and he was fucking _grieving,_ alright, and there was no way he could deal with all the bullshit that came with caring about someone. That was what he had probably been thinking as he had promised to forget everything about Remus.  
  
He had forgotten nothing. That was painfully clear. Some nights, he woke with the weight of Remus laying on him. Some nights, _worse_ nights, he woke with the sensation of both of Remus’ hands holding him by his throat, tight enough to keep him in place. And of course there were real memories as well, things that had actually happened. He remembered the two of them walking along main street early in the morning when the dusk had covered the sea and the pavement and it had seemed possible that everything else would just fade away. It hadn’t. Eventually Remus had told him to fuck off – not by those words, though – and he had.  
  
He drove past the fish shop and stopped the car only when an angry-looking kid with a tired dog crossed the street and he had to slow down anyway. The wind was colder than he remembered. He managed to lock the car on the third attempt and stood beside it for a while, watching the grey-brown house with the fish shop on the first floor. Even the advertisements on the windows seemed not to have changed. He wondered if perhaps Remus was still the same as well. Perhaps Remus was still twenty-one with badly cut hair that only got wilder in the constant wind, suspicious blue eyes with too many wrinkles around them, and a bitter mouth that always turned downwards at the edges, even when Remus was attempting a smile. But, no. He had called Remus by phone. People in the street had walked past him while he had tried to figure out how it worked after all these years. Finally, he had heard Remus’ voice. It seemed possible now that until that moment he hadn’t realised that the thirteen years that had passed were actual, real, _years._ Remus’ voice had been wearier, grumpier and _older_ and somewhere in Wales the rest of Remus was wearier, grumpier and older as well. Not that he didn’t know where exactly Remus was, because he had asked.  
  
There were few people around and they threw sideway glances at him as he walked towards the house with the fish shop as slowly as he could without actually stopping or turning around. He had come this far. Surely he could have a chat with Remus. They were just old friends meeting each other after years for a cup of tea and a good-natured ‘how have you been’, only, they had never been _friends_ and he had a feeling that neither of them was exactly fine. Perhaps they’d just stare at each other for a while, noticing every little mark time had drawn on them, and then he’d thank Remus for the tea and walk the narrow steps down through the hallway that always smelled of fish, and to the street that would be grey and quiet and unforgiving, and to the car he hardly knew how to drive, and back to the life he kind of loathed these days.  
  
Mother had always told him to stop messing around and get married. He had almost begun wondering if he actually ought to do it. It wouldn’t be the first loveless marriage in their family, she had once said when they had both been drunk on expensive wine. And perhaps it would be better that way. Love was a nuisance. Love made things difficult. Love always hurt people in the end, and usually in the between as well.  
  
It wasn’t only his mother’s voice ringing in his head these days. He was also talking to himself. He took a deep breath and tried to see the reflection in the door but the glass probably hadn’t been cleaned once since the building had been made. Fuck it. This wasn’t about love. He pushed the door open and walked into the hallway that smelled of fish. The steps were narrow. There were four doors in the corridor upstairs and he wandered for a  moment until he stopped in front of the second to last. He thought he heard footsteps but it turned out it was his own heart echoing in his ears. He had been standing there perhaps two minutes when the door opened.  
  
“It’s you,” Remus said.  
  
“Hi.”  
  
“You should’ve knocked,” Remus said, avoiding his gaze.  
  
“I didn’t -,” he stopped and cleared his throat. “I was going to.”  
  
“I heard your footsteps. Five minutes ago. Do you want to come in?”  
  
Maybe it’d be best if he walked back to the car and drove away from the town and back to London and forgot about the whole thing.  
  
“Of course. Thank you,” he said and followed Remus into the flat. The light wasn’t as dim as before. Maybe Remus had bought a new lightbulb or whatever they were called. The sound of the door closing was absurdly loud. Remus walked past him to the tiny kitchen and he breathed in slowly because Remus still smelled the same, of old clothes and vanilla – which probably meant tea – and a bit of salt – which probably meant the sea. Back then, he had wanted to kiss Remus so badly. He blinked and tried to focus on the moment, or the year, and almost offered to help Remus with making tea just to do something but remembered just in time that he didn’t know how.  
  
“So,” Remus said later, when they were sitting on the opposite sides of a table so small that their knees almost brushed against each other, “how have you been?”  
  
“Fine. And how about you?”  
  
“Fine,” Remus said, watching his cup of tea intently. “Sirius –“  
  
Oh, God. His name sounded so good coming from Remus’ mouth. “Yes?”  
  
Remus opened his mouth and closed it again, and Sirius wondered what he was holding back. Maybe Remus had wanted to ask if Sirius had anyone at the moment. He almost laughed at the thought. No, he’d have said, and Remus would have looked at him with jealous eyes. Fuck that would’ve been great. But he was quite certain Remus wouldn’t have even thought about asking that, not the Remus he had known thirteen years ago for two weeks and four days, and not the Remus who was now carefully moving his cup of tea in a circle on the table as if it was the only sensible thing to do.  
  
“Are you -,” Remus said finally, eyeing him. “Are you going to visit somewhere else? In Wales? Are you…”  
  
He should’ve lied and said _yes_. Many places. This was a tourist trip. Remus was just one stop on the road. He hadn’t been waiting for _this_ for half a year or probably a lot longer. “Not really.”  
  
“So, you came to…”  
  
“To see you.”  
  
Remus seemed quite anxious about that. “Me?”  
  
“Yes.” Obviously. Maybe he should’ve reminded Remus of how things had been the last time, how desperate he had been for Remus to… to… he didn’t even know anymore. To fuck him so he could stop thinking about how he had found James lying dead on the floor, looking through the ceiling at something Sirius couldn’t see and never would. The front door had still been ajar. It had been a windy day, so the door had kept hitting against its frame with a hollow sound as he had climbed the steps to upstairs where Lily was lying on the bedroom carpet, face down, still holding Harry who was of course crying. He had picked Harry up from Lily’s still warm arms and then he had walked away trying not to cry and failing.  
  
Oh, fuck.  
  
“You look really…” Remus was saying, squeezing the cup of tea between his hands.  
  
“Sorry. I was thinking… I was thinking about something else entirely. I came to see you as I said I would. When I called you. By the phone.”  
  
“I thought you were joking,” Remus said slowly. “Or drunk.”  
  
“I wasn’t drunk.” He had been drunk, but only a little.  
  
“Because you never called me. In thirteen years.”  
  
“You told me you didn’t want to hear from me.” He wasn’t exactly certain if Remus had actually said that, but surely it had been implied. It had been the whole point of it. He would go and Remus would live the rest of his life as if nothing had happened.  
  
“Yes,” Remus said, “but surely you knew that I didn’t…”  
  
Sirius realised he was holding his breath. “What?”  
  
“I didn’t mean it like that.”  
  
“You didn’t?”  
  
“Of course I -,” Remus began and then took a ragged breath. “Are you hungry?”  
  
“Not really.”  
  
“We could eat something.”  
  
“Here? Or could we go out? Out of the flat? Would you walk with me in the street? Maybe if I promise to stay half a step away at all times?”  
  
Remus looked miserable.  
  
“We can eat here,” Sirius said, and Remus stood up and walked to the kitchen, probably to hide. Perhaps they would eat beans from a can in Remus’ flat, all the curtains closed and lights dimmed so that no one would see them, and then he would say goodbye to Remus and Remus would look relieved. But now he was probably being a bit unfair. He stood up and followed Remus to the kitchen, where Remus was emptying a can of beans onto two plates, carefully not looking him in the eye. When he took a step closer, Remus flinched but didn’t drop the can and didn’t run away like he probably would’ve in 1981. It was nice. It was maybe a start, or an ending.  
  
  
**  
  
  
“My Mum died,” Remus said later, when they had eaten and talked a bit about how the town hadn’t changed. Sirius was sitting on the couch and Remus was sitting on the chair he had placed not as far away from Sirius as he could have.  
  
“Really?” Sirius said and then bit his lip. “Sorry. I mean, I’m sorry.”  
  
“It was years ago,” Remus said. “In 1984.”  
  
“Did you –“  
  
“Did I what?”  
  
Sirius took a deep breath. He hadn’t even drunk anything, there was no excuse for almost asking questions like that.  
  
“I didn’t,” Remus said, “I didn’t tell her. You were trying to ask that.”  
  
“I wasn’t,” Sirius said. Remus stared at him. Thirteen years ago, he had probably fallen for Remus’ eyes first. They had followed him everywhere, even when Remus had been trying not to look. Once, they had drank beer in Remus’ flat until it had turned midnight and was too late for Sirius to go to the hostel, so Remus had told him to sleep on the couch. He had been taking his clothes off when Remus had stopped in the doorway, staring at him with a blank face and eyes that gave everything away. “Sorry. I _was_ trying to ask that. You didn’t tell her?”  
  
“I told you I couldn’t,” Remus said in a stretched voice. “I told you.”  
  
“I remember.”  
  
“She would’ve never understood. And it was bad enough that I knew I wasn’t… That I knew that if she had known… I couldn’t actually _tell_ her. But –” He took a deep breath, and Sirius wondered what the hell that _but_ could be about. “I don’t know. This is bad, too. I loved her. You know I loved her. And she never _knew_. And now I can’t tell her, not even if I wanted to. Even if I decided that it’d be better that way. I can’t tell her because she’s dead.”  
  
“I’m sorry.”  
  
“Sometimes I wonder…” Remus said and then let the words hang there, heavy in the air between the two of them. Maybe Remus wondered what his mother would’ve said. That was actually probable. But maybe, just maybe, he wondered the same things Sirius did: what it would have felt like when they finally did it. Maybe Remus would have let him lie on his back, hands held against the wall so as not to hit his head against it, pillows falling off the bed, duvets following, and Remus would have stared at him all the way through it, and he would have seen Remus’ face change as Remus came inside of him, finally, _finally,_ breaking into pieces the best way possible -  
  
“I think Mum would’ve liked you,” Remus said and flinched, “not, of course, as a…”  
  
“Not if we had been together,” Sirius said. But they could’ve been. He would’ve even woken up early to make Remus tea before work. He would’ve learned how to use all the weird stuff in Remus’ kitchen. He would’ve made the tea and gone back to bed to kiss Remus on the neck where the scent of his skin would’ve been -  
  
“Yes,” Remus said. “Not if we had been together. But I think, otherwise. If I had told her we were friends.”  
  
“We were never friends.”  
  
“Just play along, will you? She would’ve liked you. She always liked people who knew how to talk, people who knew a lot of words. And you were so handsome. You looked –“  
  
“I was so handsome?”  
  
“ _Are_ ,” Remus said, biting his lip. “You are… shit. You _know_ that. It’s not like I…”  
  
“You kept watching me,” Sirius said slowly, “back then. Even when you tried not to, you still did. But I thought perhaps you were just, you know, craving someone. Anyone. I wasn’t exactly at my best. I hadn’t eaten properly in half a year.”  
  
“You were a mess,” Remus said. “I liked your mouth.”  
  
“You liked my mouth?”  
  
“I’m not saying it again.”  
  
“Fuck,” Sirius said, running his fingertips across his lower lip.  
  
“Don’t do that,” Remus said, straightening in his chair. “Don’t do that, Sirius.”  
  
“Don’t do what?”  
  
“You are… You were always trying to, I don’t know, tease me. Back then. You changed your clothes in the middle of the room.”  
  
“Where was I supposed to do it?”  
  
“In the bathroom,” Remus said as if it was obvious. “And you ripped everything off before you started pulling them on again.”  
  
“It’s practical,” Sirius said and went on before Remus could stop him. “You never took your clothes off, not even for sleep. I think you wore the same clothes the whole time I stayed here in your place.”  
  
“It was five days,” Remus said. “And we went swimming once. Just before you left.”  
  
“Just before you threw me out. And you were wearing a fucking _shirt._ ” The shirt had clung to Remus’ skin when they had climbed back to the shore from the freezing water.  
  
“I have scars.”  
  
“You have –”  
  
“It’s partly about that,” Remus said.  
  
“What kind of scars?”  
  
“Straight lines. They’re difficult to explain.”  
  
"Straight lines, like...”  
  
Remus stared at him and nodded.  
  
He cleared his throat. "Did someone -"  
  
"No," Remus cut in, " _shit,_ no. I did it. I was so... it helped at the time."  
  
“But why would you –,” Sirius started, and then he thought about the first two days after he had found James and Lily dead and before Dumbledore had sent him looking for Regulus. Sometimes the pain had been numb enough that he had stood beside the window, watching people who were passing by. And sometimes it had been so sharp he would’ve done anything to make it numb again.  
  
“I shouldn’t be telling you this,” Remus said now. “I don’t know why I’m telling you. We haven’t seen each other in thirteen years.”  
  
“Was it because you were…”  
  
“Because I _am_ ,” Remus said in a bitter voice, “because I _am_ like that. I don’t know. Maybe. I had moved to town and I was so lonely I thought I’d lose my mind. We should talk about something else. Did you find your brother?”  
  
“But you haven’t been that unhappy, have you? For thirteen years?”  
  
“No. You were looking for your brother.”  
  
“He’s dead,” Sirius said. “I didn’t find him. But he… the corpse ended up on the shore the next spring. He was probably already dead when I was looking for him.”  
  
Remus had gone paler, if that was even possible. “How did he… I’m sorry. Do you know how he –”  
  
“Someone killed him,” Sirius said. “I can’t tell you.”  
  
Remus stared at him. “Why?”  
  
Last time, he had thought about it. He could’ve made the light in Remus’ room brighter and the mattress softer. He could’ve warmed the wooden floor. And sometimes, usually at night when he had been drunk and awake and trying not to think about James and Lily and everything he had lost, he had wondered if perhaps Remus might love him then. “I can’t tell you why.”  
  
“Are you angry?” Remus said in a somewhat nervous voice.  
  
“About what?”  
  
“You wanted to -,” Remus stopped and cleared his throat. “I didn’t –“  
  
“You didn’t what?”  
  
Remus took a deep breath, stood up and walked to the kitchen. The floor creaked. The wind was pushing harder against the windows.  
  
“You didn’t what?” Sirius said, standing up and following Remus. Remus was opening and closing the cupboard doors, both hands squeezing the door handles tight enough to make his knuckles turn white. “I wanted to kiss you. You know that. I would have kissed you. And anything. Everything.”  
  
“Everything,” Remus said in a thin voice.  
  
“And I would’ve been careful. I’d been so fucking careful with you, because I knew you were terrified. I’d have stopped the second you’d have told me to. And you knew that. And you kept me in your flat for five days, staring at me when I undressed, touching my arm, touching my shoulders, touching my goddamn thigh when you were drunk enough for that, but you were never going to give me a chance, you didn’t have the guts to…”  
  
_To love me_ , he thought and leaned against the fridge. He was oddly tired and his head hurt, and it was like he still remembered what Remus’ fingers felt like, running over his thigh that last night. He had sat absolutely still but Remus had pulled his hand away and locked himself in the bathroom for fifteen fucking minutes. And when he had asked if he could kiss Remus, only briefly, they both wanted it, after all, Remus had told him it all had been a mistake. Remus wasn’t like that.  
  
But he was. He clearly was. He still was, closing the cupboard doors and letting go of them, slowly, without looking at Sirius.  
  
“You don’t know how it was,” Remus said, “for me.”  
  
“No, I don’t,” Sirius said and walked out the door. He walked through the hallway that smelled of fish and he walked beside the angry sea. At the car he stopped and went back.  
  
  
**  
  
  
In the evening, he asked if Remus still went to church. Remus said that yes, he did. Sirius asked if the church was still the same, if it still meant the same thing for Remus, and Remus looked at him as if he had missed something. Thirteen years ago, he had laughed at Remus when Remus had talked to him about God in short sentences that had, at the time, seemed completely absurd. He had told Remus that _sin_ was just a word people had invented. It didn’t mean anything. It wasn’t real. It was just a way of making sure people behaved like someone thought they were supposed to. Remus had looked at him as if he knew nothing.  
  
“I kind of thought,” he said now, “that it was about your mother. That maybe the church and your mother were kind of the same thing. Both of them wanted you to be something else.”  
  
“There’ve been times when I’ve stayed away,” Remus said, sitting on the couch with his legs crossed and his head leaning against the wall. His eyes were closed. “But I always go back. It’s in me. It’s like…like it’s in my blood or something. I couldn’t cut it off even if I wanted to.”  
  
“And you don’t want to.”  
  
“It’s in me.”  
  
“But you’re also… you’re also…”  
  
“Gay,” Remus said. “I’m gay.”  
  
“Really? You’re saying it out loud now?”  
  
“Only because you’re here,” Remus said, “and because you already know. You always knew. How? I was trying so hard to hide it.”  
  
“I had a crush on you.”  
  
“You didn’t know me. And that doesn’t explain –”  
  
“Do you remember how we met?” Sirius asked, standing up and walking through the room just to get another beer. It seemed like a waste of time. Terribly impractical. But he needed that beer. “I had just come here. Someone had heard that Regulus had been seen here and I came here to check the rumour.” Later, he had wondered if perhaps Dumbledore had known the whole time that Regulus was already dead. Perhaps it had been a way to send Sirius away so he wouldn’t do anything stupid now that the war was over and the whole community was celebrating and all he could do was drink and cry and shoot pointless hexes at the walls. “I had to stay for a night so I was looking for a hostel. But I couldn’t really read a map. You were walking along the street. And I walked up to you and asked if you could help me, and you looked so, I don’t know, you looked like you had seen a ghost. You stared at me. And your eyes were so… I wanted you to fuck me. So badly.”  
  
Remus barely flinched.  
  
“I mean, I thought you were so intriguing. And you gave me directions and I went to the hostel and only got lost twice on the way. The next day, I walked in circles in the town until I found you.”  
  
Remus opened his eyes. “I thought it was a coincidence.”  
  
“It wasn’t,” Sirius said and took a sip of his beer. Actually, he had used a few charms. Good ones for finding people.  
  
“You were looking for me.”  
  
“Of course I was looking for you.”  
  
“But you couldn’t have known that I was…”  
  
“Gay. I had a hunch.”  
  
“But it must’ve been clear that I wasn’t going to… _do_ anything with you.”  
  
_You’re the most stubborn idiot in the whole fucking world,_ James had told him the last time they had met. He didn’t even remember what it had been about. “I really liked you.”  
  
“I don’t understand why.”  
  
“Of course you don’t.”  
  
“I’m a dead-end. I’m probably never going to be with anyone. I thought about marrying a girl but I can’t do it either, it’d be so cruel and…”  
  
“A sin,” he said. The word tasted odd in his mouth.  
  
“I don’t know,” Remus said after a short silence. “Maybe not if I was honest about it. At least I’d be trying. But I don’t know who’d take me.”  
  
“I’d take you.”  
  
Remus smiled. “That’s not really helping.”  
  
“You probably could find someone like you. Someone who’s religious and all that. A man. You could live together and tell people you’re just friends, and then you’d… maybe hold hands or something. Everything you could bear.”  
  
“That’s nonsense. How would I find someone like that? By asking around?”  
  
“You’d be happy holding hands for the rest of your life?”  
  
“You suggested it,” Remus said and took a deep breath. “Of course I wouldn’t be _happy._ But that’s a lot to ask, you know. I think I’d be content if life was… nice.”  
  
“ _Nice?_ ”  
  
“I was afraid you might be dead,” Remus said, not looking at him. “I read about in the papers and I thought that maybe you caught it. They made it sound like everyone was dying.”  
  
“I’m not dying,” Sirius said. “I got lucky. And in the beginning, when it came to London and we didn’t yet know about it, I wasn’t really…”  
  
“You weren’t seeing anyone.” Remus said in a hopeful voice.  
  
“I wasn’t fucking anyone. I was… I had a job. I drank so much I missed days, but someone wanted me to keep that job, so I did. I started drinking as soon as I got home and by midnight, when I could’ve gone to a bar to try to find someone, I was already almost passing out.”  
  
“Fuck.”  
  
“I’m okay now,” he lied. Sometimes he wondered if he was the only person who was still in pieces after the war. Everyone else seemed to talk about it as if it was a distant memory. Everyone else had gotten over it. But he didn’t drink that much anymore, and after eight years of pointless paperwork in the Ministry, Dumbledore had given him a teaching job in Hogwarts. Maybe, if everything hadn’t gone the way it had, and if he’d had a different life, he might have ended up teaching anyway and actually liked it.  
  
“And now,” Remus said, “you don’t have anyone now, do you?”  
  
“What do you think?”  
  
“You came to see me,” Remus said and flinched as if it had sounded different than he had meant it to.  
  
“I called you,” Sirius said, “by phone. And I drove all the way here to see you.”  
  
“But you don’t really –,” Remus glanced at him and swallowed visibly. “You couldn’t have known if you still… liked me. Not after thirteen years. Even if you once…”  
  
“I think I loved you.”  
  
Remus stared at him.  
  
“But I was a wreck. My best friends had died and my brother was missing and sometimes I thought I might just, I don’t know, jump off a cliff. Not on purpose. But sometimes it was just too much. And then I met you and I wanted you so badly and I think I loved you.”  
  
“You couldn’t have,” Remus said in a thin voice. “I didn’t _give_ you anything. I kept you at arm’s length.”  
  
“I couldn’t forget you. Sometimes when I was with someone, I imagined that they were you.”  
  
“You mean –”  
  
“Like there’s someone fucking me and I imagined it was you instead.”  
  
“So you have…”  
  
“I always use condom. Always. I’m clean.”  
  
“I didn’t mean -,” Remus said and took a deep breath. “I knew you had had sex with people.”  
  
“Men. I’ve had had sex with men.”  
  
“How many?”  
  
“I don’t know. Does it matter?”  
  
“No.”  
  
“Maybe fifteen.”  
  
Remus stared at him as if it was hard to believe that there were fifteen gay men in Great Britain. “I have never –“  
  
“I know.”  
  
“I have to go to work tomorrow morning.”  
  
“Okay,” he said and tried to sit straight. Remus was looking at him with wide eyes. “Do you want me to find a hostel?”  
  
“You can sleep on the couch,” Remus said. “Are you going to leave tomorrow?”  
  
“I don’t need to.”  
  
“Good,” Remus said and then flinched. “But surely you know that I can’t… I’m not going to…”  
  
“I know,” Sirius said.  
  
  
**  
  
  
The waves sounded like they were crashing against the wall. He stared at the ceiling on which a narrow strip of light slowly moved towards the kitchen. It had to be past midnight but it couldn’t have been morning already, and sometimes, if he tried, he could hear Remus breathing in the bedroom. Remus had closed the door but a bit later it had opened ajar by itself and Remus hadn’t closed it again. He had probably already been asleep.  
  
It wasn’t as if Sirius had been waiting for something to happen, of course not. In 1981, he had held his breath as he had waited for Remus to come to the doorway, possibly naked but maybe wearing just pants. He had imagined Remus stopping there, watching him with his head tilted to left, messy hair falling in his eyes. Remus would’ve been cold, almost shivering. _Sirius,_ Remus would’ve said in a husky deep voice. Sirius wouldn’t have had time to answer, because Remus would’ve walked to the sofa and kissed him, on the mouth, wet and hungry and demanding, and then they would’ve fucked in silence. The next morning, Remus would’ve told him he wanted to be with Sirius so badly that he would face telling his mother and the whole world. He would face God, too. Anything. And then they’d have drunk coffee.  
  
Sirius sat up and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. Fuck. He was dreaming again. He had probably come here because he was still as stupid as he had been in 1981. He still hoped he could fix Remus. He would tell Remus that God didn’t mind the two of them having sex and anyway Remus _had_ to admit being gay because it was the only way to truly live his life. _Fuck._ And he was probably right, wasn’t he? It was absolutely terrible to think that he’d leave town and leave Remus, again, and Remus would go back to living silently without a chance of loving someone and being loved in return. But how many times had someone told Sirius it would help no one if he kept grieving his friends and his brother and everything that had happened in the war? Of course they had been _right._  
  
He still had pictures of James and Lily on his cupboard and it was clear he talked to them much more than to anyone who was alive.  
  
He went to the bathroom and when he came back, he stood beside the bedroom door for a while. He couldn’t hear Remus breathing. Also, Remus didn’t call his name and tell him to come in. Finally, he walked back to the couch and lay down. The couch was terrible, but he had already done a few quite subtle charms to make it better. Surely he couldn’t risk more. He’d have hard time explaining it if Remus found him sleeping in a proper bed next morning.  
  
  
**  
  
  
The sounds of rain and traffic came through the windows, only it wasn’t the usual London traffic, it was -  
  
“Hi,” Remus said, standing a few steps away, watching Sirius. Remus was wearing jeans and a pullover and socks that didn’t match.  
  
“Hi,” Sirius said. “Good morning. How late is it?”  
  
“Not very. I have to go to work. I didn’t mean to wake you up, I just –”  
  
“It doesn’t matter.”  
  
“Do you want breakfast? I can make you something before I go.”  
  
He thought about the two of them somewhere else, in some other place where Remus would ask the same question and then kiss him on the mouth. London, perhaps. If only he could make Remus come to London. Or maybe they’d have to buy a cottage in the countryside, where there would be no one to accidentally see them through the windows.  
  
“I could at least make you tea.”  
  
“Aren’t you late for work? I can manage.”  
  
“Okay,” Remus said but didn’t leave. “I thought that maybe I should give you the key.”  
  
“The key?”  
  
“To the flat. In case you want to go somewhere.”  
  
“So,” Sirius said, sitting up on the couch and pulling the duvet so that it covered the most of his lap and thighs, “you really don’t mind if I’m here this evening?”  
  
“I know it’s weird.”  
  
“No,” he said quickly, “no, I only wanted to check.”  
  
“You just came back yesterday,” Remus said in a somewhat hoarse voice. “I haven’t seen you in thirteen years.”  
  
“Perhaps I could stay for a couple days.”  
  
Remus nodded and a bit later gave him the key. He held it in his fist and watched as Remus took his coat and his bag and his boots and went. The faint smell of fish crept from the corridor and the rain was getting harder.  
  
  
**  
  
  
He didn’t mean to go to the church. He was walking around when he happened to pass it by. After a few blocks, he turned around and came back. It didn’t look much of a church. It was smaller than churches in London and less grand in every way, and the front door was open. He walked towards it wondering if he ought to turn back or walk past the building. But there was singing coming through the open door and no one was watching him, so maybe he could take a peek. Just a quick one. He’d have a look from the doorway and then he’d go and no one would mind.  
  
There was a choir in the front. Everyone else was listening to the singing and there weren’t that many people anyway. No one looked at him when he quietly walked to the last bench and sat down. If they didn’t want someone wandering in, surely they would’ve closed the door. Later, he bought fish and chips and sat on a bench next to the sea until the food went cold and his fingers were freezing.  
  
By the time Remus got back from work, the light was already getting dim. Or perhaps it was the weather. Remus’ hair was wet enough that it clung to his neck and his sleeves were dropping water onto the floor. Sirius had to stop his hand from reaching into his pocket to dry the carpet. He sat back on the couch and watched Remus taking off his coat before getting a towel and kneeling down on the floor to take care of the wet patch. It looked ridiculous. He could’ve done that. He could’ve done that Remus’ way and Remus could’ve stopped beside him, pushing fingers into his hair and squeezing just a little. He’d have raised his gaze to meet Remus’ eyes and -  
  
“What’re you thinking about?”  
  
He blinked and tried to push away the thought of Remus laying hands on his shoulders, one on each, and pulling him closer as he knelt on the floor. “It’s still raining.”  
  
Remus eyed him but said nothing, and he closed his eyes just for a second as Remus walked to the kitchen. He should stop thinking about things like that. He really should. But Remus’ fingers running across his neck as he’d pull the zipper open -  
  
“I visited a church,” he said. “I mean, I just happened to walk past one and wanted to see what it looked like. Inside.”  
  
“You wanted to see what it looked like inside?”  
  
“I haven’t really -,” he began as Remus stopped in the kitchen doorway, holding two empty cups.  
  
“You’ve never been in a church?”  
  
“Of course I have. Just not… not often.”  
  
Remus went back to the kitchen. “And what did it look like?”  
  
“I don’t know. There was a choir.”  
  
“I don’t have anything to eat in the flat. We could go out.”  
  
“Out?”  
  
“You don’t want to go?”  
  
“But what if -,” Sirius said, glancing at the window glass that almost shook with the rain, “what if someone sees you with me, I mean, with this ridiculously handsome bloke with the incredibly pretty mouth?”  
  
“Shut the fuck up,” Remus said, not sounding angry.  
  
The rain was almost unbearable. Sirius considered trying something, preferably a very subtle wandless charm, something that would stop him from getting soaking wet. But Remus was throwing sideway glances at him, almost as if he was checking him out, and to be honest he wasn’t quite certain he could do anything without Remus noticing. When they reached the pub, he felt as if he had walked through the sea with his clothes on.  
  
“Nice place,” he said, the streaks of water running down his neck and under his coat. “Small and dark.”  
  
“We can go somewhere else.”  
  
“It’s okay.” No one would see them through the windows for sure. The place was dark enough that he’d be lucky if he saw what he was eating. But maybe that was the whole point of it. Maybe Remus couldn’t bear watching his mouth. He bit back a smile and followed Remus to the counter.  
  
Thirteen years ago, they had barely gone outside the flat. Now Remus threw quick glances at the windows but otherwise sat still on the opposite side of the table, eating his fish and chips in silence. It would’ve been pointless to wonder what would’ve happened if Sirius had stayed. There was no way to know and he wasn’t stupid enough to think that maybe, just maybe, something like this would’ve happened eventually. He would’ve rented a flat a few blocks down the street and maybe in a few days Remus would’ve have knocked on his door. They would’ve had a few beers and talked about everything else besides what was really going on. He would’ve stopped looking for Regulus and it wouldn’t have mattered because Regulus had been dead anyway. Maybe he would’ve found a job here. There had to be something he could do. And in a few months, they could’ve done this, sat facing each other in a small, half-empty pub.  
  
He didn’t realise he had brushed his knee against Remus’ until Remus shifted his feet.  
  
“Sorry. I didn’t –“  
  
“It’s okay,” Remus said, mouth full of chips. “It’s okay, Sirius.”  
  
“Do you ever…”  
  
“What?”  
  
“Do you ever think about -,” Sirius said and cleared his throat, “- what could’ve happened?”  
  
“What do you mean?” Remus said, eyeing his plate as if he really didn’t want to know.  
  
“If I had stayed. The last time. If I hadn’t left.”  
  
The radio was going on about football and no one seemed interested in listening to their conversation anyway. He waited until Remus had glanced over his shoulders and was facing him again. “I told you to go.”  
  
“Yeah. I just mean, what if I hadn’t left?”  
  
“I’m sorry,” Remus said, “I’m sorry I did that. It was just… do you remember what happened?”  
  
“Nothing happened.” He remembered Remus’ fingers on his thigh, clumsy and hesitant and possibly shaking but it was hard to tell because the both of them had been drunk.  
  
“I wanted to,” Remus said, barely audible. “I was so drunk that last night and I thought that maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. We’d do it just once. Just once in a lifetime. In the morning I’d decide it was a mistake. And that’d be it. But just for once –“  
  
Remus took a deep breath, glancing at him. His ears were ringing. He would’ve kissed Remus back then, of course, he would’ve held Remus’ face between his palms and kissed Remus. And then he’d have laid Remus on the sofa and kissed him all over and then, finally, took Remus in his hand, and Remus would’ve hardly realised it happening because he’d have never stopped kissing Remus.  
  
“Do what?” he said. His voice was oddly hoarse.  
  
“You knew I wanted to,” Remus said. “I knew you knew. That’s why I had to tell you to go.”  
  
“What would we’ve done? What exactly?”  
  
“Shut up.”  
  
“Remus -,” Sirius began and then bit his lip. They could do it now. They could go back to the flat right now and drink a few beers or not, he didn’t mind, he could do it drunk or sober or however Remus wanted. He could kiss Remus for hours, or actually not for _hours_ , it had been years since he had really _kissed_ someone and at last half a year since he had fucked someone. He’d have to open the windows and push his head out in the rain every ten minutes just to not come in his pants.  
  
“Shut up,” Remus said, a smile lingering in the corners of his mouth. “Shut the fuck up, Sirius.”  
  
“I didn’t say anything.”  
  
“I hate you,” Remus said and filled his mouth with chips. “You’re terrible.”  
  
“You could ask me, you know. What I would’ve done.”  
  
Remus shifted in his chair. “I’m sure you have more imagination than me.”  
  
“I’ve had dreams about you,” Sirius said, which was probably stupid. But fuck that.  
  
“Don’t –”  
  
“I’m not going to tell you about them.”  
  
Remus stared at him.  
  
“Can I ask you something?” he asked. It was probably best not to wait for an answer. “Why’re you doing this? Why’re you eating with me in public and saying things like that?”  
  
“No one can hear us,” Remus said in a somewhat lower voice.  
  
“I know,” Sirius said, “but it’s not about that. It never was. You know that. It wasn’t about who else knows, not wholly, but more like…”  
  
“I’d know.”  
  
He nodded. Remus watched him for a while and then went back to eating.  
  
  
**  
  
  
“Tell me.”  
  
“Tell you what?”  
  
“Tell me,” Remus said, watching him as if trying to see through him, “tell me what it’s like.”  
  
He sat back against the sofa and let his head lean against the window glass. The sounds of the rain were gentler now. Maybe it was because he had been drinking. The only light in the flat was in the kitchen and it cast shadows on Remus’ face so that Remus looked only half-alive. Probably he did as well. Perhaps Remus kept the lights dim on purpose so as not to stare at Sirius’ mouth.  
  
“What’s like what?”  
  
“Sirius.”  
  
“Sex,” he said and felt oddly happy when Remus flinched, “surely you aren’t asking me what sex is like.”  
  
“I don’t know,” Remus said in a rushed tone, “I really don’t know. I don’t know what it’s like.”  
  
Sirius thought about standing up, walking to the chair not five steps away, and gently pulling Remus’ t-shirt off.  
  
“You’ve done it. With fifteen people.”  
  
“ _Men._ And I said, maybe fifteen.”  
  
“How old were you? When you –”  
  
“For the first time? Nineteen.” He had dragged Fabian to the corner in a bar and pushed his thigh in between Fabians’, and all the time he had felt James’ eyes following him. But they had already been at war. He had quickly began to realise he wasn’t invincible.  
  
“Did you love him?” Remus asked in a voice that was barely more than a whisper.  
  
“No. Of course not.”  
  
“Of course not?”  
  
They had smoked cigarettes on Fabian’s balcony afterwards. He had kept apologising for not lasting longer but his head had been dull and soft because of the whiskey and probably because of the sex as well, and Fabian had kept quiet as if after taking care of the rest of it, he had gone deep inside his own head and closed the door. They had done it again a few weeks later.  
  
“Everything was a mess.” Of course he couldn’t tell Remus they had been at war. “I just wanted to be with someone. And I guess he wanted the same. The first time, he felt pretty bad about it. I was a bit younger and I suppose he felt he was taking advantage.”  
  
“But he wasn’t.”  
  
“No.” They both had been.  
  
“But it was good,” Remus said, grabbing his beer with both hands, “because you did it again.”  
  
“I wanted him to fuck me,” Sirius said and wondered if it was too much, but damn it, he had already started. “But he wouldn’t. He said it’d be easier the other way around. I was barely inside of him when I came. He took care of himself while I was still catching my breath.”  
  
Remus was staring at him, his mouth half-open.  
  
“It takes some time,” he said, standing up and walking to the kitchen to get another beer. “Like everything else in life.”  
  
“But it’s good.”  
  
“Listen,” he said and dragged the couch a bit towards Remus so that the floor beneath it creaked. If he stretched his legs out now, he could probably touch Remus’ feet. He opened the beer. “There’s no _it._ Different people like different things. Different _men_ like different things. Not everyone wants to, you know, have something in their ass. It’s just one thing you can do. But there’s so much more.”  
  
“So much more,” Remus said in a bleak voice.  
  
Fuck that he wanted to kiss Remus. “You can do a lot with your hands. And your mouth. You can do _everything_ with your hands and your mouth. Either or both.”  
  
If only he could’ve reached to touch Remus now, just on the shoulder, or on the arm, whatever Remus would allow.  
  
“I could show you.”  
  
“No,” Remus said and stood up, “no.”  
  
He closed his eyes as Remus walked to the kitchen.  
  
“Tell me,” Remus said. “About you.”  
  
“What?”  
  
“How you like it.”  
  
Remus was standing in the kitchen doorway again, holding a can of beer.  
  
“What if,” Sirius said, “what if you sit next to me in the couch and I close my eyes? And then I tell you.”  
  
“Why?” Remus asked, but took a step forward.  
  
He imagined Remus leaning over him, almost touching him, maybe almost kissing him as he sat still, eyes closed, in the dark room. “You could watch me. And I wouldn’t know.”  
  
Remus sat down on the sofa as far away from Sirius as possible. “You’d know.”  
  
“Well, obviously you’d stare at my mouth.”  
  
Remus blinked.  
  
“But you could say you didn’t.”  
  
“Okay.”  
  
“Okay?”  
  
“Close your eyes.”  
  
“Are you staring at my mouth?” Sirius asked, eyes closed. His head felt fuzzy.  
  
“No.”  
  
He tried not to smile. Maybe Remus was just an inch away from him. Maybe Remus was leaning forward to kiss him right now. And he would only know it when Remus’ mouth touched him. “I like to be fucked. I really do. But with you –” He heard Remus inhale. “With you, that could wait. As long as you’d like. I’d undress you first. Slowly because obviously you’d be nervous as hell. I’d take your clothes off piece by piece and then I’d look at you, really look at you, and you’d probably blush. I know you would. And then I’d lay you down on the couch, or on the bed if you let me. I’d sit in between your knees, but, you know, I wouldn’t touch you. I’d lean down and kiss you. On your mouth. And you’d just lie there because you didn’t know what to do, but I wouldn’t mind. I’d kiss you until you grabbed my shoulders or my arms or whatever it’d be that you do. And then I’d run my fingers all over you. On your sides. Down your thighs. Everywhere. I might touch you there also. But briefly. For now. Later I’d take you in my hand. Or in my mouth. If you let me. Or I could do it with my hand. The whole thing. We could lie in the bed and I could hold you and have you come in my hand.”  
  
He opened his eyes. Remus flinched.  
  
“I’d hold you afterwards. If you wanted.”  
  
Later, he thought, Remus would fuck him. Maybe not at the same night. But later. Remus would fuck him until he forgot everything outside the tiny flat in the rainy town in Southern Wales. And in the morning they’d drink coffee and kiss and for the first time in fucking thirteen years he wouldn’t feel like he was made of broken pieces glued together with a crappy charm.  
  
“I need fresh air,” Remus said, then stood up and opened the window. The grey rain fell onto the windowsill.  
  
  
**  
  
  
“I know you think I’m naïve.”  
  
It had to be midnight already. Sometime ago he had fallen asleep for a second. But if he said aloud that he was tired, Remus would get up from the couch beside him, go brush his teeth and then lock himself in the bedroom. He would be left alone in the couch, staring at the ceiling and trying to hear Remus breathing. He couldn’t do that, not now that Remus was sitting next to him, close enough that if he moved his leg…  
  
“No,” he said.  
  
“Really?”  
  
He glanced at Remus. It was clearly a mistake because Remus was staring back at him. Merlin, those sad eyes. “Well, not really. But I don’t think it’s your fault.”  
  
There was something in Remus’ eyes, almost as if he thought _Sirius_ was the naïve one.  
  
“I mean, obviously your parents taught you to think that way. To believe in all that. Or maybe it was the whole society, I don’t know. Anyway, it’s not your fault.”  
  
“It’s funny,” Remus said, not sounding amused at all. “Sometimes I think that if I only could… be with you, whatever that means. If only I could do that, I wouldn’t be so fucking lonely all the time.”  
  
“Of course you wouldn’t, that’s –”  
  
“And sometimes,” Remus cut in, “sometimes I think I’d be just as alone. Just in a different way. Because I could never tell you how it is.”  
  
He blinked. The edge of Remus’ foot touched his on the floor, only lightly, barely enough for him to feel it. “What is?”  
  
“I could talk to you for hours,” Remus said in a hoarse voice, “I could tell you everything I believe in and everything I’m afraid of. And you’d still think that I’m naïve.”  
  
He stared at his foot next to Remus’. His feet were bigger. His head felt heavy and his mouth was dry.  
  
“Because it’s not real,” Remus said.  
  
Perhaps if they were together for a long time, he and Remus, perhaps if they knew each other all the way through, then he would tell Remus about the night he had walked through an open door and found James and Lily lying dead on the floor. There hadn’t even been blood. It had been as if it wasn’t completely real, only it never stopped. It had to be a dream but somehow he was still living inside of it.  
  
“It’s not real for you,” Remus said.  
  
He shifted his foot on the floor so that it covered Remus’.  
  
“For me,” Remus said in a somewhat hurried voice, “it’s as real as this.”  
  
He placed his hand onto Remus’ knee and ran his fingers over the worn fabric.  
  
“But you can’t -,” he said, trying to push away the sound of Harry crying in an empty house, “you can’t believe that what you _are_ is wrong. You can’t believe _that._ ”  
  
Remus laughed shortly and then grabbed his wrist, squeezed it, not gently, and didn’t let go. He felt his own heartbeat against Remus’ thumb.  
  
“I just want you to know,” Remus said, following Sirius’ wrist with his thumb, “I don’t believe in _everything._ Like, I don’t believe in UFOs. Or destiny. Or magic.”  
  
Later, when Remus had gone to the bedroom and closed the door, Sirius stood in front of the mirror in the bathroom. He had cast two illumination charms but they didn’t seem to reach the shadows on his face. He looked old and tired and awfully sad. Perhaps he should drive back to London by the Muggle car he had bought a few months ago when he had once again thought that now his life was going to change. He would stop talking to people who had been dead for a decade. He would stop hating Peter who apparently didn’t know his own name anymore. He would accept that he ought to have tried to fix things with Regulus when Regulus had been alive and _right there_ and not when everything had gone to hell and he had been driving across the country looking for his brother who had probably been lying at the bottom of a lake. And he would acknowledge that he was broken as hell. He would stop thinking about a sad-eyed boy in a windy grey town in Southern Wales in 1981.  
  
He pulled back the charms and hid the wand carefully in the back pocket of his jeans, and then he walked through the living room to the couch which smelled faintly of Remus’ washing powder and in which Remus had been sitting only half an hour ago. He lay down and didn’t bother with the charms, even though there was a button pushing into his left shoulder blade quite inconveniently. The bedroom door was ajar but he couldn’t hear Remus breathing.  
  
  
**  
  
  
He had already packed his bags when Remus opened the bedroom door and stopped in the doorway. Remus’ hair was a mess and he had dark shadows under his eyes. He wasn’t wearing a shirt. There were faint white lines on his sides and they looked like the knife had been a bit dull.  
  
“You gave up on me,” Remus said.  
  
“Of course not,” Sirius said, but he was holding two packed bags.  
  
Remus stared at him for a while and then took a deep breath. “So, where are we going?”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Remus took a deep breath. The air tasted different here. And Sirius was watching him as if he was something special, something exciting. Almost exotic. Sirius was watching him as if the one thing he had tried to hide all his life was actually something good._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here we go again :)
> 
> Betaed by ambruises, all the mistakes are my own!

There was a soft sound of the wind catching the canvas of the tent. He blinked and stared at the light green ceiling that was oddly high above his head, and then he turned to his left. The familiar weight was resting on his chest and it grew heavier now, pressing tight against his ribs. Sirius Black was sleeping not ten inches away from him.  
  
He sat up as quietly as he could but the sleeping bag rustled anyway. The zipper of the door got stuck twice before he got it open. Outside it was cold. The sky was grey everywhere he could see but at least it wasn’t raining yet.  
  
He took a deep breath and walked a few steps before looking back. The tent was small in the middle of the moors that rose and fell everywhere around. He didn’t know exactly where they were. Yesterday, he had tried to avoid talking to Sirius, because every time he had said something, his voice had been dry and nervous like he was a fifteen-year old who had never kissed anyone. Which he kind of was. And Sirius knew that. But he didn’t want Sirius to hear it in his voice.  
  
Well, he had kissed someone, a girl from his class, when he had been perhaps sixteen. But that didn’t count. If that counted, he wouldn’t be here now.  
  
“Remus?”  
  
He stared at Sirius as the man climbed out of the tent, wearing nothing but pants. “Aren’t you cold?”  
  
“No,” Sirius said and then seemed to remember something, “yeah, of course I’m cold.”  
  
Before, he had sometimes wished he could just punch Sirius in the face. What right did Sirius have to push into Remus’ life, just like that, sit on Remus’ couch drinking the rest of his coffee and sometimes licking his lower lip, and talking, talking endlessly, and changing clothes in the middle of the room. What damn right?  
  
But then again, he had almost cried in the phone when he had heard Sirius’ voice for the first time in thirteen years.  
  
He couldn’t have remembered how beautiful Sirius was, not really, not after all that time. It just couldn’t be that the reason why he had been wiping his cheeks with the back of his hand while making tea afterwards had been the vague memory of how much he had once wanted to kiss Sirius on his absurdly beautiful mouth. But still, it had taken him some time before he had been calm enough to drink his tea.  
  
“What’re you thinking about?”  
  
Maybe it was about _this._ Sirius walked toward him but stopped two feet away, just close enough that he didn’t yet have to back down, and the way Sirius looked at him was…  
  
“Nothing,” he said.  
  
“I should probably wear some clothes,” Sirius said, then turned around and walked into the tent.  
  
Remus had never told anyone, but still Sirius had seen it in him.  
  
“Maybe we should go for a walk,” Sirius said, walking back. He was wearing jeans and a t-shirt now. “I think we aren’t far from the sea.”  
  
“It’s at least twenty miles.”  
  
Sirius grimaced. “I’m bad with maps. So, do you want to go for a walk?”  
  
Remus took a deep breath. The air tasted different here. And Sirius was watching him as if he was something special, something exciting. Almost exotic. Sirius was watching him as if the one thing he had tried to hide all his life was actually something _good._  
  
It was impossible to believe in the way Sirius looked at him. But it felt good.  
  
“You don’t want to leave, do you?” Sirius said, his voice suddenly tense as if he was worried Remus might just disappear.  
  
“No. The walk sounds fine. But could we eat breakfast first?”  
  
Sirius smiled at him and it went straight through his skin.  
  
_Shit._  
  
  
**  
  
  
They walked a path edged by the heather towards hills they surely wouldn’t reach. Once in a while, the path narrowed and Sirius’ arm brushed against Remus’, but Sirius didn’t seem to notice, so after the second or the third time Remus decided he should just let it happen. Anyone who happened to see them would just think that the path was too narrow. And if Remus thought about how easy it would be to entangle their fingers, well, it wasn’t the worst he had been thinking since Sirius had been standing in his living room with a packed bag in his hands, obviously ready to finally realise Remus was no good and there was no reason to stick around, and he had stared at Sirius for just a second before he had asked where they were going.  
  
He shouldn’t have done that. Of course he shouldn’t have done that. But he had tried not to think about what it meant when Sirius had been sitting on his sofa, shifting his feet on the carpet as he waited Remus to pack, and when they had walked together out of the flat and to Sirius’ car that Sirius barely seemed to know how to drive, and when the town had sat by the road behind them and Remus had looked at it growing smaller and smaller in the back window. He had no idea what it meant. But Sirius had kept talking to him about things that didn’t make sense, like why did it rain and why did it wind and what was snow, really, and he had listened to Sirius’ voice going on and on and started thinking about other things, for example, the two of them sitting amongst the heather, Sirius’ hands on Remus’ skin, on his stomach, on his sides, moving slowly as he would feel his every breath against the flat of Sirius’ palm, and wouldn’t it be _mad_ to have someone touch him like that, and then, later, Sirius on his knees, his forehead resting against the ground so that Remus could push his fingers into Sirius’ hair as he slowly, slowly slid in. Or not so slowly. But then he had had to roll down the window because he had blushed, and Sirius had been still talking about what an odd coincidence it was that it was always cold when there was snow.  
  
“You can’t read my mind, can you?” he had asked.  
  
“I’ve never tried,” Sirius had said, staring at the road, “it’s illegal.”  
  
Perhaps all gays had as odd sense of humour as Sirius had.  
  
“You look worried.”  
  
He blinked. Sirius was throwing glances at him. When he took a look over his shoulder, he could still see the tent not so far away. And Sirius’ arm brushed against his with every step Sirius took. The path wasn’t that narrow but he didn’t move away.  
  
“Maybe we should talk about something,” Sirius said, rubbing his nose. “So that you don’t start thinking about how you could run away.”  
  
Remus tried to laugh but it got stuck in his throat. “I’m not good at running.”  
  
“You aren’t?”  
  
“I meant actual running.”  
  
“Yeah,” Sirius said, the back of his hand brushing against Remus’ wrist, “me, neither.”  
  
“Did you do any sports at school?”  
  
Sirius bit his lower lip as if trying not to grin. “Well, yeah. Some. But I wasn’t too good at it. Never had the patience.”  
  
“You didn’t have patience?”  
  
“No. Why is it funny?”  
  
“Because you -,” Remus began but drew a deep breath instead. “I don’t know. You’ve been waiting for me to come around for…”  
  
“For thirteen years,” Sirius said, glancing at him. “That’s not… I never really got over you. That’s different.”  
  
“But nothing happened. I mean…”  
  
“Nothing happened between us. Yeah, I know. Maybe it was because my life was such a mess when I met you, but afterwards… I just kept thinking, what if.”  
  
“What if –”“  
  
“What if I was still in love with you.”  
  
He tried to laugh but it turned into a cough, and Sirius was watching him with those grey eyes that had always looked at him as if he was a puzzle to solve, from the first time they had met. “Stop that.”  
  
“What?”  
  
“Stop staying you’re in love with me.” Even saying it aloud felt absurd.  
  
“But what if,” Sirius said, smiling but not very happily, “what if I am?”  
  
“You can’t be.”  
  
“Why not?”  
  
“Because we’re both –” But he swallowed the rest of it. Sirius would only laugh at him, or worse, look at him with pity. He hated pity, possibly because he had pitied himself all his life. And now it was becoming obvious to everyone who knew him that there was something wrong with him. He tried to keep people at a distance, so there weren’t too many to figure out that he was a lonely thirty-something who clearly had never had a relationship, and couldn’t he have found someone, there were so many women in the church who were turning thirty and wanted to find a good husband to start a family, surely he liked one of them? Surely he didn’t have to be alone? And when he kept saying that no, thank you but no, people started thinking perhaps there was something else wrong with him besides that obviously he was shy and a bit reserved and, frankly said, grim.  
  
“You really think,” Sirius was saying now, taking a step back so that he stood in a tussock of heather, “you really think that we can’t be in love, don’t you? Just because we’re _men?_ ”  
  
Remus opened his mouth and then closed it.  
  
“So, do you think I’m not capable?” Sirius asked. He sounded more hurt than angry. “That because I don’t want to have sex with women, I just _can’t_ love anyone?”  
  
“I didn’t –”  
  
“Because you might be just right,” Sirius said, starting to walk again, “I think the only people I’ve ever truly loved were my brother and my best friend and they’re both dead, and I was right there and couldn’t stop it, so what good did it do them that I thought I loved them? It was my fault anyway. So, actually, you’d be wise to stay away from me. We should go back. I should drive you home and fucking leave for good.”  
  
Remus ran after Sirius and grabbed his hand.  
  
“Fuck,” Sirius said, stopping so suddenly Remus almost collided with him, “ _fuck_. I didn’t –”  
  
“I almost cried when you called me from London.”  
  
“What?” Sirius said, but glanced at him anyway. Sirius’ fingers were warm and steady and he couldn’t make himself pull his hand away.  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
“Merlin,” Sirius said.  
  
“Merlin?”  
  
Sirius shook his head. “I mean, why the hell would you cry?”  
  
“I don’t know. It’s just… obviously I thought a lot about you.”  
  
“You did?”  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
“Well, I’ve always been good at making first impressions,” Sirius said, but his eyes were still fixed on Remus as if he desperately wanted to hear every nice word Remus was going to say about him.  
  
“You were so handsome,” Remus said. It was almost as if he was trying to heal a wound he hadn’t known had existed. “And so… everything. So beautiful and elegant and –”  
  
“ _Elegant?_ ”  
  
“Shut up. And you looked like you were lost, like you were in a completely wrong place, like a… a fairy king who got lost in the kingdom of men.”  
  
Now Sirius actually laughed. “A fairy king? You did that on purpose.”  
  
“No,” Remus said, “I don’t have a sense of humour. So, obviously you were far too good for this town, for _me_ , and then you just kept following me home –”  
  
“That sounds bad.”  
  
“You were nice about it. But I was going to say, you looked at me like I was…”  
  
“What?” Sirius asked when Remus had been silent for a while.  
  
“Like you wanted to get to know me. Like you thought I was someone exciting. And like you thought I was someone…”  
  
Perhaps it had been too late to turn back ever since he had packed his bags and got into Sirius’ car.  
  
“Like I was someone with whom you could fall in love,” he finished. The wind was colder now but Sirius kept holding his hand.  
  
“I’m not too good for you, you idiot,” Sirius said after a while, “that’s just bullshit and you know it.”  
  
Remus tried to think of an answer, but Sirius tugged his hand and started walking. So, perhaps he was walking hand in hand with a man, but there was no one to see them, no one except of course God. But considering everything he had ever dreamed of doing, this couldn’t be that bad. They were barely doing anything at all and still he felt if everything else crumbled, he would still hold onto Sirius’ hand.  
  
After this ended, he would probably be lonelier than ever. He would be so lonely it was almost impossible to imagine it. But he wouldn’t think about that just yet.  
  
  
**  
  
  
“How did they die?”  
  
“What?” Sirius asked, looking at him sharply. “I’ve told you about my brother. Someone killed him.”  
  
“You don’t have to talk about it. I just thought –”  
  
“It’s okay,” Sirius said and took a deep breath. They were sitting on the opposite sides of a campfire that had taken them ages to make. In the end, Remus had gone to get his backpack for more matchsticks and when he had come back, Sirius had got the logs lighted. “It’s just messy. And I’m not really allowed to talk about it.”  
  
“Why?”  
  
Sirius glanced at him.  
  
“I mean, I understand that you don’t want to talk about it, but you said you aren’t allowed, and that kind of… makes it sound like you’re spying for the government or something.”  
  
“I’m not spying for the government,” Sirius said, leaning his elbows against his knees and staring at the fire. “Not exactly. But there are things I can’t tell you because otherwise you’d be pulled into something you probably don’t want to.”  
  
Remus opened his mouth but couldn’t figure out what to say next before Sirius smiled.  
  
“But if you really fell in love with me,” Sirius said, “like, if you considered getting married and buying a house and having two kids, then I’d tell you everything.”  
  
“You would?” Remus said. His voice sounded thin.  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
“But we can’t really –”  
  
“I didn’t mean it literally,” Sirius said, “although I wouldn’t be opposed to buying a house. I don’t like the place where I live in London.”  
  
“Don’t you ever think about, you know, marrying someone and having kids and all that? A normal life?”  
  
“I’m gay as fuck,” Sirius said, “but, yes. Sometimes. Usually when I’ve been having a few glasses of wine with my mother. She always makes me feel like I’ve so completely messed up my life that I don’t even realise it. But she’s wrong about that. I do realise it.”  
  
“But you aren’t going to…”  
  
“No. I’m gay.”  
  
“But you could have a –”  
  
“A normal life?” Sirius shook his head. “I don’t even know what that means, really. Shouldn’t we try to be happy instead of _normal?_ But there’s no chance for me anyway. I couldn’t fake it. It would be, I don’t know, more like playing at a life than living it. And we only have one, you know.”  
  
Remus only realised he was staring at Sirius when Sirius raised his gaze and stared right back at him.  
  
“You don’t believe we have multiple lives, do you?”  
  
“No.” They only had this one, and then whatever came after.  
  
“I think,” Sirius said slowly, “I think that when we die, we just die. And that’s it. That’s the end of it.”  
  
“Must be nice.”  
  
“What?”  
  
“Must be nice,” Remus said again, even though his voice was thin enough that the wind stole half of it, “to be so sure there’s an ending. An absolute ending.”  
  
Sirius slowly straightened his back, looking at him.  
  
“An easy one,” Remus said. “The death.”  
  
“It’s not _nice_ ,” Sirius said as if the thought had never occurred him, “it’s… it’s supposed to be depressing, isn’t it? That’s why people believe in God or… anything. Because they need the comfort. They can’t stand the thought of everything just ending with death.”  
  
“I’ve never thought about killing myself,” Remus said, “not really, not seriously. But, you know, in days when it seems that it’s never going to get better… it’s just not on the table. It’s not. Because it’s not the end. I can’t believe it’s the end.”  
  
He could see Sirius swallow. He should probably stop now. But every time someone talked about how _easy_ it must be, how _easy,_ believing in life after death instead of facing the harsh fact of death being an ending, and how some people just needed that _comfort_ , every time it felt like a cold knife somewhere so deep in him he could never reach it.  
  
“Because if death is an end,” he said, “there’s so little to lose. What if you were unhappy? You’ll die and that’s it. What if you die young? You’d have died anyway and that’s it. It’s sad, I know, it’s terrible that some people suffer so much more than the others, but… if it’s just this one life and nothing after, then death…”  
  
“Remus,” Sirius said in an odd voice.  
  
“Death fixes everything,” Remus said. “But what if it doesn’t? What if it isn’t the end?”  
  
“Remus,” Sirius said again and cleared his throat, “Remus, I –”  
  
“Do we have marshmallows? Because I thought we bought some. And if we have, I really would like –”  
  
“I can’t fix it for you,” Sirius said, “can I? There’s no way. I can’t fix it for you because I don’t have a clue about how it must be to believe in –”  
  
“I’m not a fucking victim,” Remus said and stood up. “I think I have them in my backpack. Or maybe they’re in the tent.”  
  
“I didn’t mean –”  
  
“I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”  
  
He found the bag of marshmallows on the floor of the tent. He took them and sat down in the furthest corner so that the back of his head leaned against the canvas. The tent still smelled a bit of them, or perhaps he imagined it. He wanted to crawl into Sirius’ sleeping bag and imagine it was Sirius hugging him, because if he was being honest, wasn’t that the closest to an embrace he was ever going to have? And then he would cry a little, Sirius everywhere around him, and perhaps sleep a little, and after that he’d have forgotten everything they had talked about, and Sirius would be smiling and grinning and they would probably burn half of the marshmallows but it would be fine.  
  
He would break his fucking heart with this. _Shit._ He would break his heart and it would be pathetic because it would be over nothing. Maybe they’d hold hands again. And he’d break his heart over holding hands with someone and then letting him go.  
  
“I’m going to come in,” Sirius said from outside of the tent, “unless you tell me you’re naked in there. Or, actually, then I’m going to definitely come in. Unless you tell me not to.”  
  
“Shut up.”  
  
“You don’t sound angry,” Sirius said, but the figure Remus could see through the canvas didn’t move.  
  
“I’m not _angry._ Not at you anyway.”  
  
“Did you find the marshmallows? Because I could try. I’m good at finding things. I have a few tricks for it.”  
  
“I found them.”  
  
“Remus,” Sirius said in a quiet voice, “can I come in?”  
  
_Why would you want to_ , Remus wanted to ask. “Fine.”  
  
“Great,” Sirius said and started opening the zipper of the door. He looked worried and a bit lost. “Hi.”  
  
“Hi.”  
  
Sirius sat down in the opposite corner and placed his feet on the floor so that they almost touched Remus’. “We could talk about something else.”  
  
“Something else other than death.”  
  
“You could tell me about your life. What were you like when you were at school?”  
  
“Quiet,” Remus said. “And shy. You?”  
  
“I was noisy and arrogant. You’d have hated me.”  
  
“You’d have hated me, too,” Remus said. It was absurd how much he loved the way Sirius’ mouth curved into a smile.  
  
“So, it’s mutual,” Sirius said. “how we feel about each other. Good. I was getting worried.”  
  
“You don’t really have to. So, why aren’t you noisy and arrogant anymore?”  
  
“Am I not?” Sirius said with that posh accent that sometimes stuck out. Or maybe Sirius did it on purpose. Maybe he had realised Remus couldn’t help liking it. Once or twice he had wondered what it would feel like when they were in bed, Sirius speaking in whisper – “I don’t know. I grew older and things got complicated.”  
  
“Like how?”  
  
“I can’t tell you,” Sirius said. He sounded like he was actually sorry. “But wouldn’t you say that I’m still a bit arrogant?”  
  
“You’re changing the subject.”  
  
“Of course I am. Well, James died. His wife, Lily, she died too. And my brother died. I think it kind of… you can’t be the same after something like that, can you?”  
  
Remus shook his head.  
  
“So, I locked myself in my flat,” Sirius said, “and swore that I’d die there. Of course I was drunk. And I tried to stay drunk, but they wouldn’t let me. Not all the time.”  
  
“Who is they?”  
  
“Albus Dumbledore,” Sirius said, in a bitter voice, “and my mother. The two of them had never agreed on anything before. But both of them had these ideas of what I was. And they just couldn’t let me bury myself in there.”  
  
“In your flat.”  
  
“It was a nice thing to do, of course. Eventually. After a few years life got easier. I wasn’t so sad all the time anymore. Or I was sad but it wasn’t so… it wasn’t _everything_ I was. But I’ve told you about this.”  
  
“You told me you started seeing people.”  
  
“Men,” Sirius said in a soft voice. “Yeah. We talked about that.”  
  
“But you didn’t… fall in love with anyone.”  
  
“No. I couldn’t. I was still a mess.”  
  
“You said you were a mess when you –”  
  
“When I met you. Yeah. But you were different. You weren’t… I wasn’t looking for sex when I met you. I wasn’t looking for anything of that kind and then you just were there.”  
  
“So,” Remus said, “if you had been looking for sex, you wouldn’t have picked me.”  
  
Sirius laughed. “ _Merlin._ Do you want me to say that of course I would’ve or of course not?”  
  
“I’m not sure. Why do you keep saying _Merlin?_ ”  
  
“Old habit,” Sirius said, “from my times at school. I was in an odd school.”  
  
“Some posh place.”  
  
“You think I’m posh?”  
  
“Of course you are,” Remus said. He could probably never stop talking, not when Sirius smiled at everything he said. “And obviously I like it.”  
  
“Listen,” Sirius said, “if I had been looking for sex when I met you, well, of course I would’ve wanted to do it with you. Of course. A tall boy with odd clothes and crazy hair and that look in your eyes that you couldn’t hide. But I would’ve realised at once that a quick shag isn’t your thing.”  
  
“Well,” Remus said, “good.”  
  
“I like your freckles,” Sirius said, “and the way you smile. The corners of your mouth turn downwards so that you look a little sad even when you’re smiling. That’s intoxicating. That’s like… like I want to kiss your mouth until it finally, finally gives up being sad.”  
  
“I’m not sure that’s possible,” Remus said, but it sounded like he was a bit out of breath. “What do you mean, crazy hair?”  
  
“I’m sure your barber tries his best,” Sirius said. “Your hair just won’t have any of it. No nonsense. Just sticking to whatever direction it wants to.”  
  
Remus raised his hand to tug his hair, and Sirius laughed.  
  
“You look so good,” Sirius said. “You still do. If I met you in London, in one of the bars where I go to find someone, I’d come to hit on you at once.”  
  
“Thank you.”  
  
“And even if you weren’t interested,” Sirius said, “I would go with you, I don’t know, perhaps for a road trip in Northern Wales.”  
  
“Really?” Remus said, and then, “it’s not that I’m not interested.”  
  
“I know.”  
  
“I’m sorry.”  
  
“I bet you are,” Sirius said and nodded towards the bag of marshmallows Remus had been holding the whole time. “Should we eat those?”  
  
They ate marshmallows sitting on the same side of the campfire close enough that at some point, Remus realised their shoes were right next to each other. Sirius played the whole scene of them meeting in a bar with two marshmallows. The burnt one was Sirius and the pink one Remus, and Sirius the Marshmallow spoke in a posh voice that made Remus both laugh and get a bit breathless, and Remus the Marshmallow spoke in a voice so low and masculine that Remus just had to try to save it from Sirius’ hands. He had to. Sirius’ hands were warm and quite soft and it was getting difficult to fake that he was trying to get the marshmallow and not just run his fingers over Sirius’ skin. And then Sirius fed the marshmallow to him.  
  
“Sorry,” Sirius said, when Remus’ mouth was still full of sugar and while he was still wondering whether Sirius’ finger had brushed against his lips.  
  
“Don’t worry,” he said. “But I’m hungry.”  
  
  
**  
  
  
At night, he carefully tried to keep his sleeping bag from touching Sirius’, but it was almost as if the tent had shrunk a little after he had asked Sirius how it was possible that the tent seemed so small outside when it actually was so big. Sirius had sounded so surprised, asking Remus, if he _really_ thought the tent was _big._ Now he tried to stay still when Sirius turned to his side and said good night.  
  
He had never realised how loud breathing could be. He listened to Sirius breathing and tried not to think about what Sirius’ voice would sound like, cutting through the silence. _Remus, I have to have you. Oh_ , Remus would say, but he wouldn’t have time for more because Sirius would turn to him and kiss him on the mouth, a gentle kiss but it would still leave Remus breathless. Sirius would have one hand on the side of his face and one looking for his bare skin, on his stomach and then lower, Sirius’ fingers finding their way under the waistband of his pants, and then Sirius would kiss him again. Sirius would kiss him every time he tried to speak. And there would be nothing to say anyway, because Sirius _had_ to have him, and he couldn’t fight anymore, he couldn’t, so he would kiss Sirius back and then lie still when Sirius would undress him in a bit of a hurry, because Sirius would be so hard already, and he would tug Remus’ pants to his ankles and push his knees a bit apart, but his hands would be warm, and he would kneel down in between Remus’ thighs and then go lower and lower until he could take Remus in his mouth, and that would feel like…  
  
“Remus? What’re you doing?”  
  
“Nothing,” he said and climbed out of the sleeping bag, out of the tent, into the night that was cold and almost black. The wind went straight through him and in the tent he could see Sirius’ turning on the flashlight. He didn’t know how it would feel. He probably never would. And to think about it when Sirius was lying right next to him, Sirius who would probably do everything he asked and more, all the things he couldn’t even imagine...  
  
“Remus?”  
  
“I’m going for a walk,” he said. It was only good that Sirius didn’t try to follow him. He wasn’t disappointed at all. He walked for a little while and maybe he was in worse shape than he had thought, because it was almost as if he couldn’t feel the cold in the air anymore and the path he walked wasn’t as dark as it should’ve been.  
  
Sirius probably  knew why he had left the tent so suddenly. Surely Sirius had guessed. But he didn’t mention it and Remus didn’t either. The next day, Sirius asked if he wanted to get back in the car and drive a bit further. Perhaps there were more places here to see. But he couldn’t think about leaving yet, because what if they got in the car and on the road and he’d realise what madness this was, and then he’d ask Sirius to turn around and take him back home. Sirius would do it. Of course Sirius would do it. And then Sirius would leave him and go back to London, for good this time, and he’d be alone again, for good this time. _Shit._ He didn’t think he could handle that. So he pointed out that they still had enough food for one more night here in the moors before they would have to go. Sirius looked relieved.  
  
It wasn’t as grey as it had been yesterday. Sometimes the clouds gave in and the moors filled with colours that only lasted until the sun hid again. Sirius talked about the sea and how great it would be to see it. Maybe they should go for a swim, too. They could find a nice quiet place on the shore and camp there for a few days. Remus walked a step behind and tried not to count days. Perhaps this was going to have to be enough for a lifetime, and still it couldn’t be so much that he couldn’t turn back. Of course that was impossible. He couldn’t possibly get enough of this, and then again, he was probably already too deep in this to ever get out of this whole.  
  
“What’re you thinking about?” Sirius asked. “We don’t have to swim if you don’t want to. Or you don’t need to undress for swimming if you don’t want to.”  
  
“It’s not about that.”  
  
“You looked so concerned.”  
  
“I was thinking -,” Remus began, but Sirius had stopped in the path to look at him, really look at him, and Sirius had heather in his hair and his shirt was only half tucked into his jeans and the wind was trying to catch it so that a tiny shred of skin was visible from time to time, and it was all too much.  
  
“Remus –”  
  
“Don’t say it,” Remus said, walking past Sirius with hurried steps, “don’t say anything.”  
  
“The last thing I want is to hurt you.”  
  
“You aren’t going to hurt me,” Remus said. He could do that himself just fine. _Shit._  
  
“I’m in love with you,” Sirius said, running to him, “you know I’m in love with you. I’m going to get hurt too.”  
  
“I don’t want that.”  
  
“I know,” Sirius said, “I _know_ , it’s just, that’s _life_ , every good thing comes with a catch in it. If you ever care about something, you risk breaking down if you lose it.”  
  
“Stop _talking._ ”  
  
“I’ve played at life for thirteen years,” Sirius said, “I’ve been playing at life because they wouldn’t let me give it up, but I don’t want to keep playing anymore, I want to _live_ instead –”  
  
Remus stopped and tried to punch Sirius in the face, or probably on the arm, but Sirius stopped his hand by grabbing his wrist as if it was the easiest thing.  
  
“Sorry,” he said, trying to catch his breath. “Sorry, I was…”  
  
“I know,” Sirius said but didn’t let go of his wrist. “I could let you. If you think it would help.”  
  
“No, of course not, that’s not…”  
  
“It wouldn’t hurt much anyway,” Sirius said, and there was a grin lingering in the corners of his mouth, and _shit_ how much Remus wanted to kiss him. “You don’t look like you’ve been to many fist fights.”  
  
“You could just let go of my hand.”  
  
“And risk you taking another try?” Sirius said. “No, I don’t think so. Unless you really want me to. To let go, I mean.”  
  
Remus opened his mouth but couldn’t make himself say it.  
  
“Fine,” Sirius said, grabbed Remus’ other wrist as well before placing both of his hands on Remus’ shoulders. Sirius’ fingers kept carefully on the fabric but his hands were heavy. “You know what we could do?” Sirius said. “We could hug.”  
  
“What?”  
  
“Friends hug all the time.”  
  
“But we aren’t –”  
  
“Who cares,” Sirius said and hugged him.  
  
For a few seconds. The hug would only last for a few seconds, so he firmly said to himself and stood still. But Sirius’ hands were now wrapped around him, and when Sirius pulled him closer, he couldn’t fight it. He pushed his nose against Sirius’ shoulder. The cotton was soft and smelled of Sirius, or so he thought. How could he have known what Sirius smelled like? He closed his eyes and tried not to think about anything at all.  
  
  
**  
  
  
“What if we just kissed?”  
  
He glanced at Sirius. The green canvas rustled with the wind and the only light in the tent was the flashlight pointing at the ceiling. There were shadows on Sirius’ face, so it was hard to say whether Sirius was watching him or not.  
  
“I mean,” Sirius said, his voice quieter now, even though surely they were the only human beings within miles, “if you don’t want to have sex, maybe we could just kiss.”  
  
“Now?” Remus said and bit his lip.  
  
He thought Sirius looked surprised. “Yeah.”  
  
“You would just kiss me and leave it there?”  
_  
“Merlin_ ”, Sirius said. Remus could see his chest rising and falling with every breath he took. He didn’t have anything but a t-shirt and pants on, and he had stretched his legs on the sleeping bag so that his right foot was next to Remus’ knee. “I would cover you in whipped cream all over and lick you clean if you wanted that. But if you want just to kiss, I would just kiss you. Of course.”  
  
“Why would you cover me in whipped cream?” Remus said, but his voice was growing restless.  
  
“Think about that.”  
  
“Sirius,” he said and shifted his knee so that it brushed against Sirius’ ankle. He was still wearing jeans anyway so it wasn’t even as if they were touching. Sirius was surely watching him, eyes fixed on him as he took a deep breath and pulled his shoulders back. Maybe it made this easier that Sirius had that absurd name. If he had been Andrew or Paul or Bill, this would’ve been a lot more awkward. Remus should focus on that. He wasn’t going to kiss Andrew or Paul or Bill. And he wasn’t at home, not anywhere people knew him, no, he was in the middle of the moors, and tomorrow they would have to go to the car and drive somewhere else because they would run out of food. And Sirius was kind of right about the kissing. People kissed all the time. Kissing didn’t mean anything.  
  
“Come on,” he said in a hoarse voice, and then he cleared his throat but it didn’t seem to help.  
  
“What?” Sirius said, frowning.  
  
“I mean,” Remus said, “do it.”  
  
“Do what?”  
  
Maybe if he hadn’t been so nervous, he could’ve told if Sirius was playing with him. “What we just talked about.”  
  
“You want me to kiss you,” Sirius said. His voice had gone all soft and his ankle was pressing tighter against Remus’ knee. “Just say it, Remus.”  
  
Remus opened his mouth and then closed it again, and for a moment he was certain Sirius was going to laugh at him, gently, of course, but laugh anyway. But then Sirius leaned closer to him, palms pushed against the floor, still too far to reach Remus, but closer, so close that if Remus leaned forward too -  
  
He sat up on his knees and kissed Sirius.  
  
It was odd. Perhaps for a second he thought he had been wrong. He didn’t want this after all. He could go back home and forget about the whole thing and have a normal life. But then Sirius placed his fingers on the back of Remus’ neck, pushing the fingertips up into his hair, and Sirius’ lips were parted now, and Sirius’ breath tasted of the marshmallows they had eaten for supper because they had run out of everything else already, and Sirius was clearly trying to do something but Remus didn’t know how to react so he kept still, only he realised now that he had already let his mouth open a little. And Sirius’ fingertips were drawing circles on his scalp now, and this was nothing like he had imagined, he had imagined a slippery slope leading to everything he tried not to think about.  
  
“Please stop thinking,” Sirius said against the corner of his mouth. “Please, Remus. I’ve got you.”  
  
_You’ve got me,_ he thought. _You’ve got me. You’ve got me._ It sounded both a promise and a threat. But Sirius had one hand on his shoulder now, fingers touching his bare skin right next to the neckline of his shirt, and he had to pull back from the kiss to breathe. When he opened his eyes, Sirius’ face was impossibly close to him.  
  
He closed his eyes again.  
  
Sirius placed both hands on the sides of his face and kissed him.  
  
Perhaps he had known all along this would happen. Why else would he have left with Sirius? Maybe he had only been waiting for Sirius to ask. And he really couldn’t _do_ anything, he didn’t know where to put his hands, he didn’t know if he was keeping his mouth too open or too close, and maybe Sirius would find out that he was a crappy kisser and _leave_ , that was _unthinkable,_ he couldn’t _stand_ it… But his thoughts were getting somewhat blurrier now, and Sirius was holding his jaw, tilting his head to the right so slowly he almost didn’t notice it, and to think that he had lived this long without having a clue, a damn clue about what it was like.  
  
“You can touch me, you know,” Sirius said.  
  
“What?”  
  
“I’ll pull my shirt off,” Sirius said, “you could touch my, I don’t know, my back. Whatever you want.”  
  
He grabbed Sirius’ knee and tried to decide where to look at when Sirius pulled his shirt off. Of course he had seen Sirius without a shirt many times. But now Sirius pulled him gently closer and kissed him again, and when he placed his own hands on Sirius’ arms, it was _right there_ , all that bare skin that was warm and soft under his palms. He ran his palms over Sirius’ shoulders and then wrapped his arms around Sirius to reach his back, only he had to shift closer to Sirius to do that and his knee poked Sirius at the chest. He said he was sorry and Sirius laughed and kept pushing hair off his face as if trying to see him better, which was absurd, surely no one had ever genuinely wanted to _see_ him, but then there were fingers on his knee. He blinked. Sirius was leaning back and pushing Remus’ knee carefully aside. He let it happen. God, he would let anything happen at this point. He watched Sirius’ mouth as Sirius placed his own knees so that they were on Remus’ both sides, and Remus’ knees so that they were almost squeezing Sirius’ sides. The zipper was pressing against his stomach and it was hard to breathe but then again, maybe the two things weren’t connected. And he couldn’t say anything. He didn’t want to say anything because what if he said too much and Sirius stopped, and then who knew if he had the courage to ask Sirius to start again. He kissed Sirius and it was probably clumsy and overall quite bad but Sirius didn’t seem to mind, only kissed him back.  
  
At some point, they knocked the flashlight over or perhaps it fell on its own. Suddenly there was much less light. It shouldn’t have made it easier but it did. He ran his hands over Sirius’ back and wanted to reach downwards, _shit_ how he wanted to, and then he realised Sirius’ fingers were playing with the hem of his shirt. He said _yes_ before he could think about it but Sirius didn’t pull his shirt off, only pushed his fingers under the fabric so that they were touching Remus’ skin, and _fuck_ , he had thought sex was about lust but this was… this was… like he had been craving for someone to touch him like this for his whole life and he just hadn’t realised.  
  
“Just kissing,” Sirius was saying now in a hurried voice, “you said, just kissing.”  
  
“Fuck –”  
  
Sirius kissed his jaw and then his neck. “There’s more places I could kiss you on, though.”  
  
He closed his eyes. “Like where?”  
  
“Like, take your shirt off and I’ll show you.”  
  
“My shirt?”  
  
“Yeah,” Sirius said, and then, “I promise.”  
  
Remus pulled his shirt off. It was really too cold for this, but just when he had time to think about that, Sirius placed a kiss on his collarbone, and then another right in the middle of his chest, and then one on his left shoulder. It was almost like Sirius didn’t have a plan, like he was only trying not to run out of places to kiss Remus, and his hands were on Remus’ back and they were at least warm. And then he thought he heard Sirius tell him to lie down.  
  
“What?”  
  
“I could kiss your stomach.”  
  
“My stomach,” he said and tried not to think about Sirius pulling his zipper open, pushing his jeans to his knees, and then kneeling down to -  
  
He lay down and closed his eyes, but Sirius’ mouth stopped at his navel and then the trail of kisses began reaching for his neck again. He placed his hand on Sirius’ neck and pushed his fingers into Sirius’ hair.  
  
“I’d do it all,” Sirius said, his mouth wet and warm against Remus’ neck, “you know I would. But I don’t want you to change your mind afterwards and run away into the night.”  
  
“I wouldn’t.” He probably would, though.  
  
“Tomorrow,” Sirius said and kissed his neck, “tomorrow we’re going to find the car and then we’re going to drive somewhere and buy food. I’m hungry. And then we’re going to drive somewhere else. We’re not in a hurry.”  
  
He let Sirius wrap his arm around his waist and pull him closer, although surely there was no way he could fall asleep like this.  
  
  
**  
  
  
When he woke up, it was still completely dark and there was something heavy resting on his shoulders. He turned to his side and Sirius’ arm moved with him but didn’t fall from his shoulder. Sirius was snoring lightly and didn’t even flinch when Remus carefully crawled out from the sleeping bag and to the door. It was cold outside but he couldn’t risk going back to look for his pullover, so he only took his shoes and walked to the darkness. The tussocks of heather rustled when he stepped out of the path.  
  
The sky looked so huge here. He pushed his hands deep into his pockets and tried to see it all, but he had a feeling he always missed something.  
  
He was already walking back towards the tent when he saw soft light coming through the canvas. He stopped perhaps fifty feet away and Sirius pulled the zipper of the door open and climbed out. For a second he thought about sitting down on the ground. The tent glowed with soft light inside and everywhere else it was all dark. But Sirius was already walking towards him. He opened his mouth but couldn’t think about anything to say, and Sirius stopped beside him and turned his gaze to the sky.  
  
“Was it good?”  
  
“What?”  
  
“The kiss.”  
  
“Shut up,” he said and then rubbed his nose. His fingers were getting cold. “Was it?”  
  
“I thought you might pass out,” Sirius said in a soft voice.  
  
“Shut _up._ ”  
  
“You asked.”  
  
“Aren’t you cold?”  
  
“No,” Sirius said, still looking at the stars right above them. “I could warm you up.”  
  
Remus bit his lip. “How?”  
  
“There’re options,” Sirius said and took a tiny step towards him. “When I was a kid, I always tried to see myself in there.”  
  
“Yourself?”  
  
“My name. Sirius. It’s a star. But at some point I realised I’m trying to see Regulus these days. And isn’t that sad, you know, because if I had tried this much to see him when he was alive, perhaps he wouldn’t have died.”  
  
“I’m sure it wasn’t your fault.”  
  
“No, it wasn’t,” Sirius said, “I didn’t kill him. But I stopped reaching for him. And he got lost. Maybe I would’ve been the one who could’ve pulled him back.”  
  
“You can’t know that.”  
  
“No, I can’t,” Sirius said, sounding sad.  
  
“What if I said to you that I’m falling in love with you,” Remus said to the stars so far away from them that there he could’ve been anything, anyone, “what would we do?”  
  
He felt Sirius glance at him but didn’t dare to look.  
  
“I think,” Sirius said slowly, “I think tomorrow we’d go to the car and drive to the nearest gas station or supermarket and we’d buy food. And then we’d worry about the rest. How much do you like your job?”  
  
“Not much. Are you saying that I should come to London?”  
  
“You could. If you wanted to. Or I could come to you. Or we could find a new place.”  
  
“Would we live together?”  
  
“I’m afraid I have a lot of odd habits,” Sirius said. “But eventually, why not. If you wanted to. Or we could have our own flats and still be together.”  
  
“What would we tell people?”  
  
“I would like to tell them,” Sirius said slowly, “that you’re my boyfriend. I’d love that. But it’d be up to us. We don’t owe anyone anything. We don’t owe them explanations. We don’t need to tell them we’re in love if we don’t want to.”  
  
He tasted it with every breath he took in, _we’re in love, we’re in love, we’re in love._ The sky was so high he almost could imagine saying it aloud. It would fit here. The moors had heard worse things and the wind would catch the words and take them away.  
  
“You’re shivering.”  
  
“It’s damn cold in here.”  
  
“Do you want to stay?”  
  
He glanced at the sky for one last time. “No.”  
  
Sirius followed right after him and waited by the door when he climbed inside the tent. The canvas ceiling hang low above his head and when Sirius came in, the whole tent seemed to shrink. For a moment Remus thought he couldn’t breathe, but then Sirius placed his steady hand on Remus’ knee.  
  
“Are you tired?” Remus asked.  
  
It was too dark to see Sirius’ expression. “No.”  
  
“Then,” Remus said, and the words got stuck in his throat but he pushed them forward, because if he didn’t do it now he would never do it, and the thought made him ache like he was going to lose something he had never had but still couldn’t live without, “then, perhaps we could… you could… do something. To me.”  
  
“Like what?” Sirius asked, and then, a smile lingering in his voice, “Really?”  
  
“But not… I’m not going to…” _Shit._ He couldn’t even fucking say it.  
  
“I know,” Sirius said. “Just keep talking to me. Tell me what you want. And especially tell me what you don’t want.”  
  
But in the end Remus didn’t talk much. He took his jeans off before he had time to lose his nerve, and only when he was lying on the pile of sleeping bags with nothing but pants on, he remembered he had dreamed of Sirius undressing him. But it could wait. He was cold and couldn’t stop trembling, although actually he wasn’t _that_ cold, so maybe trembling had something to do with the way he felt Sirius’ eyes on him even if he couldn’t really see, or how he heard Sirius’ breathing grow slowly heavier. Sirius turned on the flashlight but he told Sirius to put it away, he couldn’t stand the light, he didn’t want to see what they were doing. The light disappeared and he closed his eyes, and then Sirius was leaning over him, he could feel all the warm skin, and soon Sirius would touch him, maybe through the fabric of his pants, or perhaps Sirius would push his hand underneath, and _shit,_ he couldn’t stop shivering, and -  
  
Sirius kissed him on the mouth long enough that he stopped thinking, at least a little, and then carefully placed his palm on him through the fabric. He thought about the stars. He thought about how as a kid he had been walking by the seaside and the sky had been grey and the cliffs had been grey and the water had been grey as if someone had stolen all the colours. And then he had to drop all the thoughts, because he was getting hard in Sirius’ hand, it was happening, it was _finally_ happening, and if this was the only time he could ever have this, he had to remember all of it, only he couldn’t concentrate, and he thought about how he had first seen Sirius in the town, holding a map and looking both lost and surprised about having got lost, and Sirius had been so _beautiful_ , the first man in ages that had made Remus mind go blank for a second, or the first boy, they had been barely adults then, but now they were, he was an adult and he was going to have sex with this man he probably had fallen in love with thirteen years ago and had never fallen out of it, not properly, because he hadn’t had guts to admit that there was something to fall out of.  
  
“Remus,” Sirius was saying, “Remus, can I –”  
  
“Yeah,” Remus said, although he was talking to the other Sirius, the one who was standing on the corner of the street in 1981, asking for directions to the hostel, his coat open even though the day was awfully cold, and that bold stare in his eyes, the bold stare that looked straight through Remus and _saw_ him -  
  
He bit his lip when Sirius took him in his mouth. Maybe it was too much. He was going to place his hands on Sirius’ shoulders and push Sirius away, but his hands ended up in Sirius’ hair instead, and he could’ve just asked Sirius to stop, he could, but then Sirius would’ve stopped and Remus would’ve been left with… Surely there was no way back. Not now. Not anymore. And it was so good. So good. There was guilt, too, but he could deal with it. Later. It was too good. And maybe he loved Sirius. Maybe that was why he couldn’t give up on the idea of them… the two of them… having the impossible thing… having the… relationship and…  
  
Sirius rested his palms heavily on Remus’ thighs when Remus came. Later, once he was lying flat on his back again, still breathless but not biting back a moan anymore, Sirius let go of him, opened the door, and spit outside the tent. The cold air crept in. Remus closed his eyes and tried to breathe.  
  
“Was it good?” Sirius asked, lying down next to him and kissing him on the neck. “Was it how you thought it’d be? I think I could do it better. But I didn’t want to tease you. Not this time.”  
  
He felt as if he had been carved empty.  
  
“Remus?”  
  
“Can I kiss you?”  
  
“You’ll taste yourself on me,” Sirius said slowly. “Maybe you won’t like it.”  
  
“Hold me then.”  
  
“How was it?” Sirius asked again, wrapping his arm around Remus’ waist and pulling him closer.  
  
“Good. It was so good.”  
  
“You’re being nice.”  
  
“It’s like,” he said, “like if you tasted ice cream for the first time, and right after someone asked you to grade it. Sirius, what do I do now?”  
  
“What?”  
  
“To you.”  
  
“Don’t worry about it. I’m fine.”  
  
He reached in between their bodies until he got his fingers wrapped around Sirius. When he started moving his hands, he wished right away he knew where the flashlight was. He wanted to see how Sirius was looking at him, or maybe Sirius wasn’t looking at him at all, maybe Sirius’ eyes were closed and his mouth half-open when his breaths grew heavier again.  
  
“Remus,” Sirius said, “Remus,” and when Remus’ wrist was beginning to hurt, “faster, please, faster and harder, please, please, please –”  
  
He was already thinking about how he couldn’t go any faster when Sirius came in his hand.  
  
“I’m sorry,” Sirius said after a short silence filled with both of their breaths, “sorry, I bet your hand is sticky. I can deal with that.”  
  
“You have a napkin?”  
  
“Shit,” Sirius said, “no. Sorry.”  
  
“I should go wipe it clean on the heathers.”  
  
“Poor heathers,” Sirius said, but he sounded like he was thinking about something else altogether.  
  
When Remus came back to the tent, it seemed even darker than before. He lay down next to Sirius and thought about something to say. He should say he’d never do that again. But he couldn’t. Of course he’d do it again. He’d do it again and again. And he’d go to London with Sirius. He’d find a job and rent a flat of his own. And at some point, it would be fine.  
  
He closed his eyes and when he opened them again, it took him a few seconds to realise Sirius had put the flashlight on. Next he realised that the light was soft and dim and that there was a tiny shining ball floating in the air in the furthest corner.  
  
“I have to tell you something,” Sirius said.  
  
  
**  
  
  
He didn’t understand a word of what Sirius was telling him. He kept saying that Sirius was joking, but the ball floating in the air, shining soft light all around the tent was still there. Then Sirius made their backpacks float through the air and the tent grow bigger until it was twice as big as it had been. Then Sirius told him to wait for a second and disappeared, and just as Remus had realised that Sirius had actually gone, there he was, sitting right where he had been.  
  
“It’s called Apparating,” Sirius said.  
  
“You went –”  
  
“Just outside the tent.”  
  
“But you didn’t –”  
  
“It’s magic,” Sirius said, and it was as if he was repeating the word to make it sense, but it didn’t, it made less sense every time Sirius said it.  
  
“But how did you learn –”  
  
“At school,” Sirius said, looking at him as if it was obvious. “Some people are like that. Some people have magic in their… blood. I don’t know.”  
  
“But why didn’t you –”  
  
“Why didn’t I tell you? We aren’t supposed to tell anyone. It’s just… sometimes it happens that someone falls in love with a Muggle.”  
  
He stared at Sirius.  
  
“A Muggle,” Sirius repeated, “you’re a Muggle. A non-magical person. Someone who doesn’t do magic. Well, anyway, I want to… you know I want to be with you. So, I had to tell you.”  
  
“What else can you do?”  
  
“I can do a lot,” Sirius said in a quiet voice. “I’m pretty good at it. And I could show you. I could show you everything. If you want me to.”  
  
“I think I need to sleep,” Remus said.  
  
In the morning, he woke up alone. He heard his own heartbeat as he stood up, but there was Sirius, outside the tent, his figure a blur image in green canvas. When Remus climbed out of the tent, Sirius was sitting in a chair that hadn’t been there yesterday, holding the wooden stick he called his wand, and pointing it at Remus’ coat.  
  
“I’m just cleaning it,” Sirius said. “It had mud on both sleeves.”  
  
Remus went back to the tent and closed the zipper.  
  
  
**  
  
  
The car was still where they had left it. Remus opened the side door and was going to get in, but Sirius stood a few steps away on the side of the road, staring at him with a blank look.  
  
He closed the door and leaned his back against it, turning to Sirius.  
  
“Where’re we going?”  
  
“I don’t know,” he said. “Why did your friends die? And your brother?”  
  
Sirius flinched but didn’t draw his gaze away. “We were at war.”  
  
“ _Shit._ ”  
  
“It might not be over for good,” Sirius said, looking like he bitterly regretted having to say it.  
  
“So, is it dangerous? What you do?”  
  
“Magic? I think anything can be dangerous if you use it wrong. Do you think physics is dangerous?”  
  
“Where do you want to go?” Remus said, nodding towards the car. His voice sounded thin and tired.  
  
“I want to -,” Sirius said slowly, “- find a place that sells food. And then I want to see the sea. I want us to camp somewhere near to the sea, and this time I’m going to fix the tent. I don’t understand how you people can sleep in tents that small. And then I’ll show you everything you want. Or you can ask.”  
  
Remus took a deep breath. His fingers were getting cold and it was beginning to rain. He tried to imagine the two of them sitting in an absurdly huge tent, Sirius waving his magic wand around to move things and make lights, and himself asking questions, only he didn’t have a clue what to ask. _Are you joking_ was still the first in his mind.  
  
“Don’t you believe in God,” he said, “your people? Even though what you do is supernatural?”  
  
“Some do,” Sirius said.  
  
“Do you think they’re wrong?”  
  
“Yeah,” Sirius said and smiled, “but then again, I could be wrong.”  
  
“I think there’s a gas station fifteen miles ahead,” Remus said. “We should go there. And then find the sea.”  
  
He couldn’t stand seeing Sirius’ grin, so he opened the side door and sat in the seat. The rain fell on the windowsill and he felt absurdly tired.  
  
“I can turn into a dog,” Sirius said, sitting in the driver seat.  
  
“Shut up.”  
  
“I’ll show you later,” Sirius said and started the car. “It’ll blow your mind.”  
  
  
**  
  
  
Later, they parked the car on the side of the road in a place where the sea was just behind cliffs that weren’t too high. They walked on the cliffs for maybe an hour before finding a cove where they could swim. Remus stood watching on the shore when Sirius took all his clothes off and ran into the water until it reached his chest. It had to be freezing.  
  
“Come on,” Sirius said, turning to him. “I’ll warm you up. I know a charm. Just come here and you’ll see.”  
  
“But you don’t have your -,” he said and took a deep breath, “- your wand.”  
  
“I can do it wandless,” Sirius said. “I told you I’m pretty good.”  
  
Remus was sure the wind grew harsher the second he started undressing. But he couldn’t help it. He was going to go the water, to Sirius who was waiting for him and grinning as if the water wasn’t cold. He had come too far to turn around now. He took his pullover off first and then his jeans, and then his t-shirt and his socks, and he more felt than saw Sirius’ grin fade away when he pushed his pants to his ankles and kicked them to the pile of clothes in the sand. Then he turned back to Sirius, who quickly returned his gaze to Remus’ eyes.  
  
“Really? You’re staring at my…”  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
Remus bit his lip so as not to ask if it was okay, if _he_ was okay, if this was okay. At least Sirius was still waiting for him in the water. He walked until the waves pushed water onto his feet, and it was cold, perhaps Sirius had been kidding about the warming charm and they’d both freeze to death. But he’d find out soon enough. He grit his teeth together and walked to Sirius, his steps slowing down as the water surrounded him.  
  
“Great,” Sirius said and reached forward to grab Remus’ arm. “Come here.”  
  
“What –”  
  
“No one’s watching,” Sirius said and pulled him closer through the freezing water, only Sirius’ skin was warm, really warm. When Sirius wrapped his arms around Remus, it was like stepping into a warm bubble. He could still feel the water but it wasn’t cold anymore, and he could feel the wind but it wasn’t harsh, and Sirius was kissing his ear. “So, are you cold?”  
  
“No.”  
  
“I told you,” Sirius said, smiling like an idiot. “I can keep it up without a wand just for a few minutes. So, enjoy it fast.”  
  
  
**  
  
  
The next morning Remus woke to an odd sound, as if a branch was hitting the canvas.  
  
“Shit,” Sirius said, sitting up next to him. He felt colder right away. “I have to let it in.”  
  
“Let it in?”  
  
“No one’s missed me in months,” Sirius said, crawling to the door and opening the zipper. There was an owl just outside the doorway, and it seemed to be trying to get in. Remus tightened his sleeping bag around him as the owl sat down on Sirius’ knee and Sirius took a small paper the owl had apparently carried tied to its left leg. It looked like a letter.  
  
Sirius pressed the paper flat against his knee and stared at it.  
  
“ _Fuck._ ”  
  
“What?”  
  
“It’s Dumbledore,” Sirius said, only his voice was distant and rushed as if he wasn’t exactly talking to Remus, “he says you-know–who is back, Voldemort is back, Harry has seen him, he tried to kill Harry but failed, again… I have to go.”  
  
“ _What?_ ”  
  
“I’m sorry,” Sirius said, placed his hand on Remus’ neck, pulled him closer and kissed him. “This is bad. I have to go right away. Can you pack the tent? And everything?”  
  
“Yeah,” he said, “but –”  
  
“I’ll come back for you,” Sirius said, letting go of him and walking through the door, “as soon as I can.”

 


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“So,” Remus said slowly, as if he really didn’t want to ask, “what’re you doing here?”_
> 
> _“I don’t know yet. Can I stay?”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The last chapter, again betaed by ambruises!

He tried to call Remus perhaps four times. People kept passing him by as he stood in the telephone box. When Remus didn’t answer, he found the number to the fish shop downstairs and called there. The girl behind the desk told him in a happy voice that yes, she knew whom Sirius was talking about, and no, she hadn’t seen him in ages.   
  
“You could probably track him,” Fleur said a few days later, when he was sitting in her and Tonks’ kitchen, drinking too strong coffee. “I can help if you want to.”   
  
“I don’t have anything of his.”   
  
“Well, it’s going to be tricky,” Fleur said. “You have to use your memories. But you’ve been talking about him for weeks. I think your memories are strong enough that they’ll pull you to him. If you do the charm right.”   
  
“I’ve been talking about him for weeks?”   
  
“You started right after -,” Fleur began and then waved her wand and the kettle poured more coffee in Sirius’ cup. “So, were you lovers?”   
  
“ _ Fleur _ ,” he said. He heard Tonks laughing in the living room.   
  
“What? Did I say it funny?”   
  
“No,” Tonks said, “Sirius is just conservative about these things.”   
  
“I’m  _ not. _ ”   
  
“Old-fashioned.”   
  
“Tonks –”   
  
“What would you tell your mother,” Tonks asked, stopping in the doorway, “if you found him and brought him to London?  _ Mother, this is my very dear friend Remus Lupin? _ ”   
  
“You’re in idiot,” Sirius said. “I’d never introduce him to my  _ mother. _ ”   
  
“I’ll find you a good charm,” Fleur said and walked to the living room. “I think I have a book that has a few.”   
  
Two days later, Sirius apparated to a tiny village on the Welsh coast, not far away from where he and Remus had spent a few days camping. His head was foggy and it took him a moment to realise it was raining. There was one café in the village, so he sat there for half an hour until he was so nervous his knees started trembling. He had to ask for directions twice, but it turned out there weren’t so many people living in the moors outside the village and Remus was kind of famous for being even quieter than his father had been. But in the end Sirius almost turned back the moment he realised he had found Remus’ house. It was grey and small and it stood lonely in a dale covered in heather. It was still raining.   
  
He walked closer to the house and wondered if Remus was watching him through the windows. Perhaps Remus would think that he had finally gotten old. Perhaps Remus would see the lines under his eyes and the old burn on his left elbow, the one no healing charm had managed to fix.  _ You could’ve lost the whole arm,  _ the weary-eyed woman at St. Mungo’s had said.   
  
Or perhaps Remus wasn’t here at all.   
  
He hadn’t even reached the gate yet when someone stopped on the first step.   
  
Remus looked older and wearier and not very happy to see him, and also not convinced that he was actually there. He wanted to run to Remus and kiss the man, and also he wanted to run away.   
  
“I’m sorry,” he said, “I’m sorry, I was… I couldn’t… the things were… but I’m here now.”   
  
“It’s been three years,” Remus said.   
  
  
**   
  
  
Remus’ house was small and full of things. There was a living room where books covered every surface including half of the couch, and a kitchen where there was a piano with a huge houseplant on top. Remus put the kettle on and leaned against the counter full of mugs.   
  
“No one ever comes here,” Remus said to the fridge. “Most of this stuff is from Mum and Dad. I thought about getting rid of it, but…”   
  
Sirius thought about Grimmauld Place and how, one day, he would be the one who would have to get rid of all the stuff. Merlin, that would be dangerous. “I like your place.”   
  
Remus laughed but didn’t sound happy.   
  
“So, what have you been doing?” Sirius said. The rain fell against the windows and the house was quieter than houses were supposed to be.   
  
“In past three years?”   
  
“I’m sorry, I know that I –”   
  
“Nothing. I’ve been doing nothing. Or, I mean, nothing special. Dad died almost two years ago. I thought about selling this place but then I came for a weekend, to arrange everything, and never left.”   
  
“So, you don’t…”   
  
“What?” Remus asked in a cold voice.   
  
“You don’t have anyone.”   
  
Remus walked to the stove, took the kettle and poured hot tea in the mug on the table in front of Sirius. Then he placed a box of Earl Grey next to the mug and put the kettle away.   
  
“I’ll be right back,” he said.   
  
  
**   
  
  
Half an hour later, Sirius found Remus sitting in a swing hanging from the only tree in the yard. He stopped a few steps away, levitated a plastic chair across the yard to himself, and sat down in it.   
  
“I don’t know why you left,” Remus said in a stretched, “and I don’t know why you didn’t come back.”   
  
“It’s raining,” Sirius said. “You’ll get wet.”   
  
“I have a raincoat.”   
  
“Seems impractical.”   
  
Remus stared at him as he did an umbrella charm over Remus. The rain fell on the figure of an umbrella and ran down like curtains around Remus.   
  
“Sometimes I thought I had imagined it,” Remus said, “the magic, I mean. Because I kept looking for it but couldn’t find it anywhere. And I kind of kept looking for you, too. I saw you everywhere, in the corners of streets, in supermarkets, in book stores, on television, and in the church, too. Every time I saw someone who resembled you at all I thought it was you. I thought you had come back. As you said you would.”   
  
“ _ Fuck. _ Remus, I’m –”   
  
“But this magic,” Remus said, “I thought that at least I had imagined  _ it _ . I couldn’t have imagined you, not really, because I drove back home in a car I hadn’t bought. I still have it. But of course I had probably imagined what I thought we had.”   
  
“Let me –”   
  
“But it’s true,” Remus said, “the magic. You can still do it.”   
  
“Of course I can still do it.”   
  
“You can move through distances. Can you move through time?”   
  
“No.”   
  
“Too bad.”   
  
“Yeah.”   
  
“So, how have you been?” Remus asked with a smile that looked like it had been charmed on his face.   
  
“Not good,” Sirius said. “We were at war.”   
  
“You were at war.”   
  
“Yeah.”   
  
“A war that I didn’t know anything about.”   
  
“It was more like… people disappearing without a trace.”   
  
“But you’re okay.”   
  
Sirius nodded and then took off his coat. Remus flinched and the swing creaked, and he tried not to look like he had noticed as he showed his elbow to Remus. “This is the worst I got. I took a pretty bad hex on my elbow. My arm didn’t move an inch for maybe two weeks. But that was it.”   
  
“But you could’ve died.”   
  
“Yeah.” Sometimes, in the middle of it, he had thought it was long overdue. But then again, Dumbledore had brought him back in Harry’s life, probably because the old man knew Sirius would do anything to protect Harry. He had been bitter about it, too. For thirteen years Dumbledore had kept him aside because he wasn’t good enough to raise a child, which was kind of fair, of course, since for the first five years he had been drunk all the time. But when Harry needed someone to throw himself into the storm of hexes, Dumbledore thought Sirius was the right man for the job.   
  
“Is it over now?”   
  
“Yeah. For good this time.”   
  
“So,” Remus said slowly, as if he really didn’t want to ask, “what’re you doing here?”   
  
“I don’t know yet. Can I stay?”   
  
“You don’t know what?”   
  
“If you’re going to forgive me.”   
  
“Forgive you for what?” Remus asked in a quiet voice that almost got washed away by the rain.   
  
“That I didn’t come back. Even though I promised. And even though we were in love.”   
  
“Were we?”   
  
“Yes,” Sirius said, “yes, we were.”   
  
“When I think about it,” Remus said, “what I remember is the weeks after. Because I thought I had been lonely before. But I hadn’t had a fucking clue.”   
  
“I’m –”   
  
“It would’ve been so easy for you,” Remus said, “to come to see me. You wouldn’t have needed to ride by a bus or take a train. You could have just popped out of thin air. To me.”   
  
“I wanted to. I wanted to but –”   
  
“We should go inside,” Remus said and stood up. The circle of falling water moved with him.   
  
  
**   
  
  
_ I wanted to come to you _ , Sirius thought, watching Remus who was sitting on the coach, staring through the window at the rain.  _ I wanted to come to you. But it was all happening again. Voldemort was back. People were disappearing. People were dying. And I just couldn’t bring you to a mess like that. I couldn’t bring you in because you might’ve died and then it would’ve been my fault. _ _   
_ _   
_ _ I wanted to come to you. Right away. But it was all happening again. Dumbledore set up the Order and they needed me. Dumbledore needed me. Harry needed me. I couldn’t leave him. I couldn’t stand the idea that he might die like James and it would be my fault because I were somewhere else doing something else. _ _   
_ _   
_ _ I wanted to come to you. But the war was going on. And it was like it was all that was happening. And it was difficult to remember that just a little before I had been in Wales with you. It seemed like that had happened in another life. _ _   
_ _   
_ _ I wanted to come to you. But I couldn’t. Not right away. And then too much time had passed. _ _   
_ _   
_ _ I wanted to come to you. But there was a war going on. And if I had been with you, if we had been together, I would’ve had so much more to lose. _ _   
_ _   
_ “Remus,” he said aloud, “I wanted to come back to you, but –”   
  
“Don’t,” Remus said in a sharp voice, “I don’t want to hear it. Whatever it is.”   
  
“Sorry. I just –”   
  
“You don’t have a clue how hard it was for me,” Remus said, “how difficult it was to… I don’t know, to let you in. It was the first time in my fucking  _ life  _ that I thought that maybe, maybe I could be with someone who was… whom I really liked. And wanted. The first time.”   
  
“I know,” Sirius said, “I know, I’m –”   
  
“And you left me,” Remus said, “you  _ left me. _ After we…”   
  
“I didn’t mean to.”   
  
“After we had sex.”   
  
“I didn’t  _ mean to. _ ”   
  
“Sirius,” Remus said, and saying Sirius’ name seemed to draw something out of him because his shoulders fell and he dropped his gaze from Sirius’ eyes, “I thought we were  _ together. _ ”   
  
“We were,” he said and cleared his throat, “we should’ve been, I just messed up, I always mess up everything good in my life –”   
  
“Stop talking. I don’t want to hear it.”   
  
“But you’re talking.”   
  
“You left me,” Remus said and shook his head as if it was unthinkable that Sirius had actually done that. “Did you have someone?”   
  
“ _ What? _ ”   
  
“Did you have someone?” Remus said again. His voice was getting lower and hoarser and quieter as if he was tired of talking but couldn’t stop now that he had started. The rain was hitting the windows, nothing in the room was moving and outside the whole world was grey.   
  
“No,” Sirius said, “no, I didn’t, if I had thought I could have a relationship, I would’ve gone to you in a second, but there was so much going on and –”   
  
“Did you fuck someone?”   
  
He straightened in his chair. The Remus he remembered had been scared. And it was still in Remus’ eyes, all of it, but his voice was just bitter now. “Yeah.”   
  
“Who?”   
  
“Does it matter?”   
  
“Yes,” Remus said firmly, “yes, it does. Who did you fuck?”   
  
“Kingsley Shacklebolt.”   
  
“Kingsley –”   
  
“Do you want to know more?”   
  
“Yes,” Remus said, although he sounded as if he wasn’t feeling right.   
  
“He was in the Order,” Sirius said, “in our… in our group in the war. It was just fucking.”   
  
“Just fucking.”   
  
“Once,” Sirius said, “I drank too much after a meeting and tried to hit on him. He took me to the bathroom and fucked me.”   
  
“He –”   
  
“It was good. It was so good, because for a few seconds I didn’t think about everything I could lose.”   
  
Remus was staring at him. He took a deep breath. He was probably going to say something about how they had done it for a few times, always in a hurry, and he had been drunk every time. Maybe it was an explanation or maybe he wanted to hurt Remus more. But when he opened his mouth, Remus flinched.   
  
“I couldn’t bring you there,” he said instead. “You could’ve died.”   
  
“Don’t –”   
  
“You need tea. I’ll make you some.”   
  
Remus shook his head but sat still as Sirius went to the kitchen, cleaned two mugs with a very practical charm Molly Weasley had taught him and then wondered what kind of tea Remus liked most. He didn’t dare to ask. When he came back to the living room, Remus was resting his head in his hands.   
  
“It’s cinnamon,” he said and passed the cup of tea to Remus. “It was the first I found.”   
  
“Thank you,” Remus said. Their fingers brushed against each other, but then Remus took the cup and placed it on his left thigh, and Sirius felt oddly cold, just standing there on the floor.   
  
“You’re welcome.”   
  
“Can you sit?”   
  
He sat down in the same chair as before.   
  
“What’re we going to do now?”   
  
“Let me sleep here.”   
  
“Why?” Remus asked. He sounded so tired and so scared and so hopeful.   
  
“I need another chance. Or maybe it’s the third. I don’t know how to count them.”   
  
“I didn’t know where you lived,” Remus said, “I didn’t have your address. I didn’t have your telephone number. I didn’t have anything. You just disappeared.”   
  
“I don’t have a telephone,” Sirius said, “I’m a wizard.”   
  
“Shit.”   
  
“And I’m sorry, I’m so –”   
  
“And I missed you so much. I couldn’t even believe it. It didn’t make sense. We were… we had spent a few weeks together. In a lifetime. I shouldn’t have missed you like that. I shouldn’t have. And I couldn’t even call you. I couldn’t even leave desperate messages in your voicemail.”   
  
“In my what?”   
  
“I don’t know how to fix this.”   
  
“Let me sleep here,” Sirius said again.   
  
  
**   
  
  
“You’re still doing that.”   
  
“What?”   
  
“You git,” Remus said, biting his lower lip. He was standing in the doorway to bathroom, leaning his shoulder against the doorframe and watching Sirius. The cold bright light came from behind his back so Sirius couldn’t really see his eyes. “You still change clothes in the middle of the room. Like you want me to see.”   
  
Sirius glanced at the shirt he had just dropped onto the floor, and then he opened the zipper of his jeans.   
  
“You’re terrible,” Remus said in a quiet voice.   
  
“Do you want me to stop?”   
  
Remus shook his head. Sirius pushed his jeans to his ankles and then stepped out of them.   
  
“So,” he said. It was possible that he sounded a bit nervous. “Where do you want me?”   
  
“I don’t know,” Remus said. “I have a guest room. But I haven’t cleaned it in months. I figured it’d be pointless because no one comes here.” There was a clock ticking loudly on the wall. “So, it’s full of dust.”   
  
“I don’t like dust,” Sirius said. That was why Molly Weasley had once taught him a charm that got rid of it in a second.   
  
“And the couch is too short for you,” Remus said, “and also, it’s full of books.”   
  
“Yeah.”   
  
“I have a king-size bed.”   
  
“You do?”   
  
“My parents bought it. When they got married, I think.”   
  
Sirius nodded. Maybe Remus was waiting for him to suggest it. But he couldn’t take the risk.   
  
“It’d be practical,” Remus said finally.   
  
“What would be?”   
  
“If you’re comfortable. Sleeping in the same bed with me, I mean.”   
  
“Of course,” Sirius said, trying not to sound too excited, or, what was even more important, trying not to sound like he was thinking about Remus fucking him in that bed. He would keep saying how sorry he was and Remus would keep telling him to shut up, _ shut the fuck up, Sirius _ , only Remus wouldn’t probably say _ fuck.  _ But Remus would fuck him. To shut him up. And because he was here, he was finally here, and Remus wanted him after all this time. Remus would be impatient and a bit too hasty and it would be so good, Remus inside of him, grabbing his hips tighter as he began unravelling -   
  
“I need to brush my teeth,” Remus said.   
  
Remus’ bed was wide enough that they could both lie on their backs without their arms brushing against each other. Remus was breathing slowly and steadily and it sounded as if he had rehearsed it. Perhaps he had. He had spent a long time in the bathroom. He had covered himself in fabric from toe to neck and that was probably why he had opened the window so that the rain fell onto the windowsill now. He would’ve been more comfortable with less clothes on.   
  
But Sirius wasn’t going to point any of that out. He was going to lie here, quiet, not doing anything, not doing anything at all because who knew what would drive Remus away. In his life, he had managed to break almost everything he had cared about, so it was kind of probable that he’d break this, too.   
  
“I have a godson,” he said.   
  
“What?”   
  
“Harry. He’s James’ son. James’ and Lily’s. He’s a great kid, only he’s seventeen now so he’s technically an adult.”   
  
He turned to his side. Remus was watching him. The light from the window fell on Remus’ face and drew years on it.   
  
“I tried to protect him,” Sirius said, “for the last three years. That’s what I’ve been doing.”   
  
“Is he alright?”   
  
“Yes.”   
  
“Why’re you telling me?”   
  
“I don’t know,” he said. “I want you to know me.”   
  
“I think you’re going to leave me again,” Remus said, and his voice sounded oddly loud. “That’s it. I think you’re going to leave me again and my heart is going to get broken again and I can’t stand it. I feel like I’m waiting for a blow.”   
  
“Why’re you telling me?” Sirius asked.   
  
“I don’t know,” Remus said with a hint of a smile in his voice. “I want you to know me.”   
  
“Maybe this time,” Sirius said, “everything will go like it should.”   
  
“Maybe you won’t leave me.”   
  
“You should meet Harry. And you should meet my mother, too. And I apologise beforehand. Because she’s going to be terrible.”   
  
“I can’t meet your mother,” Remus said. He sounded as if he really wanted to meet Sirius’ mother.   
  
“Yes, you can. The house is full of old hexes, though. We’ll have to charm you so that you’ll get through.”   
  
“Do they know you’re gay?”   
  
“Yeah.” He wasn’t sure if Harry knew. Sometimes Harry was quite oblivious.   
  
“Sometimes,” Remus said, moving slightly so that the mattress shifted, “I wish I had told my Mum.”   
  
“Maybe she knew anyway. My mother knew before I told her.”   
  
“You really think she might’ve known?”   
  
“I don’t know. Remus?”   
  
“Yeah?”   
  
“I’m really sorry.”   
  
“Just don’t do it again,” Remus said, turning to his back. “We should probably try to sleep.”   
  
Sirius waited until he was certain Remus had fallen asleep, and then he climbed out of the bed as quietly as he could and went to close the window. It was stuck. The rain fell onto his hands now and the cold wind came through the open window. When he finally got back to bed, Remus had shifted so that he was now lying in the middle of the mattress, his right arm hugging the spot where Sirius had just been.   
  
  
**   
  
  
He woke up to a streak of sunlight coming through the curtains and warmth sticking to his skin. Remus was still asleep, his hair ruffled and his side rising and falling with breaths, the blanket pushed to his feet. He looked younger when he slept.  _ Merlin. _ If only things had been different in 1981, perhaps then Sirius would’ve stayed in Remus’ little flat in the tiny grey town in Southern Wales. Perhaps they might’ve had a chance, if Sirius hadn’t been so lost in his own grief, or if he hadn’t been so impatient with Remus not knowing how to fall in love with him, or if he had had a bit more understanding of what, for him, had been nonsense but, for Remus, had been the whole word. Perhaps, if he had gone to the church with Remus, even once, it would’ve made things easier. Or if he hadn’t tried to explain how Remus was wrong. Perhaps then they might’ve lived these past sixteen years together. Those years would’ve been so much better.   
  
Probably.   
  
They would’ve made different mistakes. And he would’ve hurt Remus in different ways than he had now.   
  
He climbed out of the bed carefully so as not to wake Remus up. Remus flinched but then murmured something that wasn’t actually words and turned his face away from the streaks of sunlight. Sirius took his jeans from the floor and looked at Remus for a few seconds before retreating to the kitchen. There he opened every cupboard door and found out that the way Remus kept his things was very disorganised. Well, he didn’t mind. He did his best with what he remembered of Molly’s cooking charms and what he could find in Remus’ cupboards, and when he was floating the plates to the kitchen table, Remus stopped in the doorway.   
  
“What if you drop them?”   
  
“I won’t.”   
  
Remus was frowning.   
  
“But if I did,” Sirius said, “I would fix them.”   
  
“You can do that?”   
  
“Yes.”   
  
“Once,” Remus said, biting his lower lip, “you said you could turn to a dog.”   
  
Sirius set the rest of the plates safely on the table and then pulled the dog on. Remus’ house was full of smells, some of them new and some of old, and a lot of  _ paper _ , and dust, and  _ books _ , and oh, he wanted to lick Remus’ hands.   
  
When he was leaning against the counter again, Remus was looking at him with his mouth half-open. “My godson,” he said, “Harry. I couldn’t see him when he was a kid. It wasn’t safe. But I was so… I learned how to do this so that I could visit him. The people with whom he was living hated me, of course, I was this black stray dog who always tried to get into their garden. But Harry loved me. And no one ever found out.”   
  
“That’s mad,” Remus said with wide eyes, “I mean –”   
  
“I know. I can probably do a lot of things you think are mad. But you’ll find out with time.”   
  
“With time?”   
  
“Yeah,” he said and made the pot pour coffee in two mugs. “Or are you in a hurry?”   
  
“Not really,” Remus said slowly.   
  
“Good,” Sirius said and floated two chairs to the table. Remus stared at the chairs and then at him. It was probably a bad idea to start thinking about how it could always be like this, him making breakfasts for Remus who would look at him with eyes full of disbelief, that looked quite similar to wonder.   
  
They ate mostly in silence. The sun reflected on the windowpane and got stuck in the layer of dust and old fingerprints, and in the light it was easy to see that there was grey in Remus’ hair. They were both getting old.  _ Merlin. _ Sirius filled his mouth with toast, looking at Remus’ hair and the wrinkles around his eyes and his freckles and his mouth and his long fingers that grabbed his coffee mug tight as if afraid that it might fly away. He bit his lip not to smile.   
  
“So,” Remus asked in some point of it, his eyes fixed on his own hands, “what’re you doing now?”   
  
“In London?”   
  
“Yeah.”   
  
“Nothing,” Sirius said. “It’s only been weeks since… well, we had a battle. A big one. That ended it. So, I’m still kind of trying to figure it out.”   
  
Remus took a sip of his coffee.   
  
“I have a flat there,” Sirius said. “It’s nice enough. Or it could be nice.” It also didn’t have Muggle technology in it, but this seemed like a wrong moment to mention that you could only get water from the tap by using magic. Well, if Remus chose to come to London, Sirius could find a new place. He wasn’t fond of the one he had now, anyway. “I haven’t had a job since… not during this war. But I guess I should now. Dumbledore would probably arrange something for me in the Ministry if I asked.”   
  
“In the Ministry?”   
  
“The Ministry of Magic.”   
  
For a second Sirius thought Remus was going to laugh.   
  
“Come to London,” he said when Remus had hidden his face behind the coffee mug again. “For a few days. I can show you my world.”   
  
“I don’t know -,” Remus said and took a deep breath. “I can’t… I don’t know what…”   
  
“You don’t have to promise me anything,” Sirius said. “It doesn’t mean that I expect you to… anything.”   
  
“Anything,” Remus said in a thin voice. “Listen, it’s not that I don’t want to.”   
  
“I know.”   
  
“I’m thirty-seven years old. Don’t you think that if I was going to… don’t you think it’s too late?”   
  
“No,” Sirius said, only he said it a bit too quickly. Remus gave him a sad half-smile, so he tried again. “No, I don’t. Too late for what?”   
  
Remus only stared at him. He imagined Remus saying it aloud.  _ To be happy. _ Or, possibly,  _ to have sex _ , only perhaps it was a bit smug to suppose Remus was thinking about sex when they were eating toast and drinking coffee and Sirius hadn’t even took a glance in the mirror this morning. Or perhaps Remus would say  _ to have a life together. _   
  
“We could still have a life together,” he said. “I don’t want to be smug, but my father was a pretty good-looking man still in his sixties. Just so that you know.”   
  
Remus laughed, taking quick glances at him. “So that I know.”   
  
“Yeah. You should have all the facts, when you make decisions.”   
  
“The longest we’ve managed to spend together is three weeks. Or was it two and a half? And it happened in 1981.”   
  
“I’ll take my chances.”   
  
“The odds are pretty bad, though.”   
  
“But you never know,” Sirius said, “you never know before you try. Think about it. If you decide it’s not going to work out, you’ll never get to know whether it would have.”   
  
“That’s so damn optimistic it’s depressing.”   
  
“But it’s kind of true.”   
  
“If I came to London,” Remus said, took a deep breath and finally looked him in the eye, “if I came to London with you, for you, would you still…”   
  
“What?”   
  
“Would you still -,” Remus cleared his throat, “- have sex with people?”   
  
“ _ Men.  _ And, no.”   
  
“No?”   
  
“Yeah.”   
  
“Because we would be –”   
  
“Because I’d take a chance with you.”   
  
Remus moved his plate back and forth on the table, placed his hands on his knees for a second, and then started moving the plate again. “So, what do you want to do today? The sea is ten miles away but I have your car.”   
  
“Or we could Apparate,” Sirius said, trying not to smile too much.   
  
  
**   
  
  
They spent the day walking a path that followed the shore. It took some time for Remus to recover after they had Apparated to a lonely spot beside the rocks, and Sirius held his arm for a little longer, just in case. But after some time Remus started smiling. And it was a beautiful day even when the clouds filled the sky again and the air smelled of salt and rain and the water beneath the cliffs was as grey as the sky. When they found a place where they could swim, Sirius didn’t have to wait long in the water until Remus walked to him. It was freezing, the water, but he put his best charms on and pulled Remus closer, so close he could push his nose to Remus’ neck and it almost didn’t make a difference. Their legs got tangled in the water and their feet sunk into soft sand together, and Remus placed his palm on Sirius’ back and held onto him, even though the waves weren’t that big.   
  
Perhaps they’d be alright, he and Remus. Perhaps it was true what he had said and they still could have a life together. He kissed Remus’ ear and then, when Remus didn’t pull away, he placed his hand on the side of Remus’ face, and that was when their feet slipped on the sand and Remus’ hand fell from his back.   
  
“You were going to kiss me,” Remus said later, when they were eating chocolate on the shore, watching the sea that was growing restless as the evening drew closer. “Earlier, you were going to kiss me.”   
  
“Was I?”   
  
“Yeah,” Remus said, firmly as if he was prepared to argue for it, and Sirius bit back a smile. “When we were in the water.”   
  
“Well, you could be right.”   
  
“I hate you.”   
  
“No, you don’t,” he said. Now he couldn’t help smiling. And what a luck it was that Remus didn’t hate him, what a miracle that he thought there was a very good chance Remus was in fact in love with him, still, and already.   
  
“It’s going to rain,” Remus said. “We should go.”   
  
“There’s no rush,” Sirius said. “I can do magic.”   
  
  
**   
  
  
Late that night, he lay on Remus’ bed as Remus turned off all the lights and then undressed him, slowly, not letting him help at all, and he had a feeling that maybe Remus had planned this beforehand. Maybe this was something Remus had replayed in his mind time after and time and now that it was actually happening, it was still only half-real. He bit his lip and tried to stay quiet, only it turned out that Remus didn’t want him quiet, Remus wanted him breathing hard and calling Remus’ name in a somewhat desperate voice, Remus’ name, nothing else, no swearing. He could do that. When he closed his eyes, Remus’ free hand reached to touch his face, so he kept his eyes open and tried to fix his gaze onto Remus’ eyes, and Remus’ touch on him grew bolder and stronger and, at some point, hastier, until he came on Remus’ hand and thighs. Then he let his gaze drift to the ceiling, and Remus grabbed both his knees as if to lean against something, and sat still on the mattress, breathing hard, all his clothes still on.   
  
The next morning, he woke to Remus’ fingers stroking his hair. When Remus’ eyes found his open, Remus stayed still for a few seconds and then leaned in and kissed him on the mouth.   
  
  
**   
  
  
Sometimes he found himself worrying about how it all was going to turn out. Remus worried about it all the time. He could see it in Remus’ eyes even if Remus tried not to show it. A week later, as he was back in London and drinking wine in the library in Grimmauld’s Place, he told his mother that he was never going to get married or have children, and that he had in fact fallen in love with a Welsh man, a Muggle, and that they’d be coming to a dinner some time soon, perhaps next year. His mother didn’t look the least surprised. Harry looked, though, as if he had been certain Sirius would live his whole life alone. Sirius tried not to be bitter about it. Harry was only seventeen, after all.   
  
The situation with the flat was a bit difficult, because clearly he had to find a new place to live now that he wanted Remus to come over often, all the time, and everything in his flat functioned on magic. He tried to find two Muggle flats close to each other, but he knew nothing of Muggle flats and so he always had to bring Tonks along, which was difficult itself because Tonks and Fleur were trying to start a family and Tonks was quite busy. So, it all took time. But he was happier than he’d been in years, which meant that he was happy for the first time since he had been maybe nineteen, only these days being happy was somehow different. It had a lot of grey in it.   
  
But he didn’t mind. He was certain it was quite possible that he and Remus would be together for a long time and that they would be, for the most of it, happy.   
  
And things were pretty good as they were. Every time he went to see Remus in the tiny house in Wales, Remus was still in love with him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi guys, I'm going to ramble a little.
> 
> Last spring, I was in the university library, looking for things written by an Australian human geography researcher who seems to be interested in the same kind of questions that I do, when I stumbled into a book called _Queering Religion, Religious Queers_. I read like maybe ten pages of it and it kind of hit me in the face with the thought that was something like, there are people who are both queer and religious and for whom religion isn't something to get rid of but something that's a big, valuable part of their identity, something to hold onto. That's kind of obvious, isn't it, I just hadn't thought about it. Or I hadn't thought that there might a book written about questions considering this, or research made. (Or fiction written, which is what I'm trying to do here.)
> 
> Because the thing is, I think, and what I try to make Sirius realise in this story, that religion may seem like an absurd thing or a bunch of stupid rules for someone who's looking at it from the outside. But it's not. It has so much power (for good and bad) that's hard to explain for someone who doesn't get it, who has, let's say, never considered for example _a sin_ to be a real thing. Or, if we go deeper, _the heaven_ or _the hell_. This kind of religious words can mean everything to someone and nothing to someone else. And I can't believe I had missed the obvious fact that there are queer persons who have to deal with things to do with religion, their own, experienced and lived everyday religion and the religious communities they might be a part of.
> 
> I don't often write about homophobia because I'd like to live in a world where it doesn't exist, and often it feels great to "write it off" by writing stories in which it's just is not a thing. And I think we need that kind of stories, coming-out-stories that don't have to deal with issues that might be the case in real life, or might not. But I wanted to write about homophobia together with religion (as something that's an important part of your identity, not a cultural frame put on you by others), because I don't see that kind of stories. Maybe I don't know where to look.
> 
> This is the longest I've ever written for "Chapter Notes". I really hope what I wrote in this story about being gay and being religious comes out with respect and kindness.


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